Start Up Company Launches New System for Wood Floo
Beatrice, NE, March 14, 2006--Blue Valley Automation, a start-up manufacturing company offering new levels of automation for the wood flooring industry, has launched with its first innovation, the LS-180 Nesting System.
The LS-180 will reduce material handling costs and increase production efficiencies for flooring producers by automating the process of assembling random length hardwood flooring into nested bundles. It is expected to revolutionize packaging in the wood flooring industry.
Among the most obvious benefits of the LS-180 are dramatic reductions of unskilled labor, a decrease in per unit cost, and access to precise and detailed real-time production data. With the LS-180, the management staff can know the actual quantities available to sell as soon as they come off the line as well as monitor what is being produced to never before available precision--the bundle size to within .10 of a square foot. The LS-180 can generate up to an 80 percent reduction in unskilled labor costs while increasing skilled labor productivity. For example, a plant using eight people per shift to manually nest bundles would save about $240,000 per shift, per year with the LS-180.
In all cases, the LS-180 will be customized to the specific mill where it is installed. The LS-180 was invented by Bob Ahrens, a woodworking professional in Lincoln, Neb., as a means of eliminating costly, repetitive material-handling functions which are more accurately and efficiently accomplished through automation.
By automating what has traditionally been a bottleneck in flooring mills, the LS-180 streamlines the packaging process by assembling individual pieces of random length flooring into uniform units. This is accomplished by a series of interconnected mechanical components that are readily accessible and easily maintained. The machine is designed to operate at end-matcher speeds in excess of 180 lugs per minute. With three bundling stations, the LS-180 sends 19.5sf bundles of 2-1/4" strip flooring through the strapping machines at a rate greater than four bundles per minute. This equates to an estimated through-put capacity in excess of 37,000 square feet per eight-hour shift. Greater efficiencies are realized with wider widths.
The system utilizes a proprietary nesting software program consisting of multiple interacting algorithms with variable parameters determined and controlled by an on-site computer operator. Once a graded piece of flooring is placed into a lug, it is recognized by the system. The software dynamically allocates machine resources to guide it from the grading station into the most efficient combination of runs and layers to create a bundle. Since the length of each piece is measured to within 1/4", the actual square footage per bundle is quickly recorded, and average-length grade requirements are easily attained. Excessive "shorts" can be managed automatically by being down-graded, bundled separately by grade, sorted by length, or re-circulated to be blended back into full length bundled stock. Any of these options can be chosen "on the fly" with soft commands available to the machine operator.
The LS-180 also collects data and makes reports available to authorized users on the plant's computer network in a format compatible with Microsoft Office products. Sample reports include cumulative historic data (starting when the machine is installed) on through-put efficiency, production by grade, average-length compliance, production yields, shorts management, grader performance, equipment uptime, usage times of various machine components, and much more. With the LS-180, managers from all business units can now have access to a wide array of critical information, constantly updated in real-time.
