Paper manufacturer invests in heavy duty automated warehouse

Stora Enso has invested heavily in an automated roll warehouse and polyethylene extrusion coating plant at its Imatra mills in Finland. The Imatra complex, which comprises the Kaukopää and Tainionkoski mills, has a capacity of more than one million tons/yr of carton board and specialty packaging paper. With this investment Stora Enso aims to increase and meet increasing customer demand for food service board and liquid packaging board.

The full roll handling scope for this investment with the new automated warehouse was ordered from Pesmel, and is one of the biggest deliveries in Pesmel’s history requiring 80 man years work.

“The system is good example of our Material Flow How concept, where the high bay warehouse synchronises the production processes flexibly and efficiently. With packing and loading included, all the components of our concept will be delivered,” says Kaj Fahllund, vice president of the paper division, Pesmel.

The heart of this new system layout is Pesmel’s TransRoll ARW concept, which is connected with 7 in-out connections at different floor levels between the mill production and converting lines. It has ~30,000 tons buffering capacity for intermediate rolls to be used at mill converting, and also for finished rolls to be shipped out to end customers.

This concept’s storing volume can be expanded in the future, as well as the number of its connections. The whole footprint of the warehouse is only ~4500 sq m with high ~8 t/m2 effective storing density. It has a 900 t/h fully automated in-out handling and sorting capacity with two stacker cranes. 

TransRoll ARW is equipped with the Pesmel WMS warehouse management system, which is connected to MIS (mill information system) to track the roll flow and to keep the real-time storage inventory for the converting and shipping operations.

Automated OptiWrap

Pesmel’s roll handling scope includes a connecting conveyor system and a new high capacity kraft wrapping line, with robot core plugging and head insertion. The handling capacity is set to 120 r/h, but this can be increased in the future by 20-40%.

Automated truck loading

With automated truck loading the unpacked rolls are transported from TransRoll warehouse to a coating mill nearby. The rolls are loaded and unloaded fully automatically in a horizontal position, which eliminates the possibility of roll-away. Transferring the rolls unpacked generates remarkable savings to packing costs.

The installation includes custom tailored Pesmel FlowCare portal. This digital IoT (Internet of things) interface collects, saves and analyses information from the delivered system, and helps to foresee service needs and to eliminate the mill’s bottlenecks with material flow. The FlowCare portal gives access to e-shop, spare part, maintenance and document services, ticketing system and to 24/7 customer support.