MOVIPAL

The ever increasing demand for environmentally friendly solutions for current operations has grabbed the attention of a design team at Stellenbosch University. The MOVIPAL is an environmentally friendly innovation for warehousing logistics.

The target of the MOVIPAL is small to medium sized warehouses in the production and logistics industries. These warehouses do not always have the capital or need to invest in expensive warehousing systems. Thus they often rely on rudimentary means of solving their packaging, palletizing, transport and storage problems. The design team visited several local companies to gain a better understanding of warehousing, especially in a South African business environment. Pacmar, a local company in the food and beverage industry, for instance, rely on manual labour for their palletizing operation. The labour is expensive and they are not very efficient and consistent. Also, this puts heavy physical strain on the workers, resulting in warehousing issues and financial loss. The second issue arises when one considers forklift operation. Forklifts require skilled operators in order to be effectively utilised, these workers are expensive to hire. Also, forklifts introduce risk to the workplace and contaminants when working in the food and beverage industry. 

The proposed product will address the problems associated with two warehouse operations, namely palletizing and local transport. The design is a mobile palletiser, the MOVIPAL. It combines the functionality of a gantry style palletiser and a forklift, providing a mobile palletizing solution. The MOVIPAL uses remote SCADA communication to wireless control and monitor the system. The system is powered using SEW’s MOVITRANS®. The MOVIPAL can save organizations money because the retail price will be significantly lower than other palletizing systems and fewer forklift operations shall be needed to perform all the tasks required. Also, the MOVIPAL uses less energy since it completes all its functions in the minimum amount of movements and it utilizes gravity to generate electricity by using a SEW regenerative breaking motors.

The MOVIPAL uses 2.6 times less energy than the conventional methods. It will also amortize the capital cost of the MOVIPAL in 5 years and 2 months and it operates 3.5 times faster than the conventional methods. In addition to saving energy, it will save R 0.5 million on labour expenses. The MOVIPAL increases efficiency and accuracy since the system is completely automated, eliminating human error. The system can stack an entire pallet in 26 seconds. The MOVIPAL is a truly reconfigurable system, i.e. whenever production capabilities increase, another MOVIPAL unit can be added to the system, and the opposite is also true.