Tinturaria Florisa, a company based in Brusque, Brazil, operates in the textile segment. Its production is focused on dyeing natural and artificial fibers. Florisa has progressively equipped its production facility with state-of-the-art equipment, as well as specializing its productive and administrative workforce.
Challenge
Prior to the implementation of collaborative technologies, transporting textile materials was a tedious and laborious process. Workers used forklifts to transport these materials from the warehouse area to the production floor. In a typical workday, forklifts took a few hours to deliver materials and this increased in extremely busy production times.
“Transporting the fabrics located in the warehouse to the production floor is without a doubt one of the heaviest logistical tasks that exist in our plant,” said Patrick Laurens Stolfi, cost engineer, Florisa. “The distance traveled between one point and another is very long without considering that there are different obstacles on the way. In addition, within the route you must pass through some busy areas within the plant. Therefore, in Florisa we saw an area of opportunity that we had to attack with the implementation of new technologies.”
Solution
Florisa turned to autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for assistance. It uses five MiR1000 AMRs from Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) with a payload capacity of 1,000 kg (2,204 lb) each. The AMRs operate inside a five-story warehouse integrated with four elevators and RFID cages, in addition to the connection to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) and warehouse management systems (WMS) for control of the entire process. There are 450 receiving positions and 3,000 tissue storage positions.
The MiR1000 AMRs controlled by the MiR fleet management system have made it possible to increase production profits, more assertiveness in less execution time, more data and analysis and fewer errors in the production process.
MiR1000s come equipped with the laser scanner technology provide a 360-degree field of view for optimal safety. The 3D cameras on the front have a range of between 30 and 2,000mm above ground level, and two sensors located at each corner ensure that the robot sees fabric cages and other obstacles that can normally be difficult to see to. other robots.
“In addition to the pioneering spirit, becoming a benchmark company in Industry 4.0 in Brazil is very important as we see an increase in productivity that is even scalable, and the expectation exceeded in the operation are also achievements that highlight the relevance of MiR mobile autonomous robots”, he added.
MiR certified systems integrator Pollux provided the necessary support for the deployment of Florisa’s AMRs. “Many companies look at Industry 4.0 from the perspective of increasing productivity only. However, there is another line of Industry 4.0, which is knowing how to use technologies to create a differentiated experience for the company and create a competitive advantage from the point of view of offering products to the market. The Florisa project put technology in favor of this scenario,” said Gustavo Baumgarten, GM, Pollux.
Results
The objective at Florisa was to increase the capacity. With the manual process of input and output of materials, there were losses, rework, and high cost.
“Initially, the idea was to go from a production of 90 tons per day to 160 tons per day,” said Laurens Stolfi. “With the project underway, it was possible to reach 200 tons per day, which is an increase of 122% of what was foreseen in the project.”
“At Florisa, workers can now manage MiR robots through a single interface, which triggers artificial intelligence to assign orders to robots,” said Laurens Stolfi. “AI groups orders in a way that reduces unnecessary walking and prioritizes work based on item location, shipping times, and other configurable criteria.”
Associates can focus on other important tasks that add value to the business while MiR1000 robots travel on their own to a meeting point to transport fabrics.
“Optimizing our internal transport with the fleet of five MiR1000 robots managed by MiR Fleet that has a simple and centralized online configuration is one of the main characteristics of our solution,” said Laurens Stolfi. “We have eliminated bottlenecks and interruptions thanks to the uninterrupted operation of mobile robots within our facilities.”