Material depot fully automatically supplies machine

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Honeycomb Cassette Storage System UNICOMPACT

'Because space is money and often very limited, KASTO’s idea to use vertical space in the form of high rise storage systems was utilized'

With today's high rise storage systems from KASTO, managed and controlled by the fifth system generation of the in-house developed inventory management software KASTOlvr, just supplying material is by far not the most important characteristic any more. Intelligent thinking and order-related commissioning are today key impulses with which KASTO-customers achieve better re-sults with less costs in a shorter period of time. This is extremely important under today's cost pressure and competition but the family-owned business, with approx. 500 employees, is here right "at home". KASTO is with saws, storage & retrieval systems as well as software the only company in the industry that is able to offer the entire complexity without interface from one source and is therefore the recognized market leader.

It increases product knowledge and solution competence at the same time, but also makes crisis management easier for the customer. A team of 11 programmers, part of the 60 employees in R&D, did not only grow up with "sawing and storing by KASTO", but they also have designed all storage functions such as material order management, installed the software at the customer and interfaced it with the customer's software. This improves the knowledge about what is going on in the company and shortens the error analysis of the complex interconnecting of different systems, functions and requirements of hourly-paid and salaried employees. The KASTOlvr can communicate with all in the industry used inventory management systems, i.e. SAP and similar, and all production computers since interfaces are clearly defined. Even more: Upon customer's demand, KASTO-programmers can dial into the system of the KASTOlvr-controlled storage ar-eas and machines in seconds via modern VPN-connections via internet from Achern to solve problems via mouse click or to change programs and upload them via hotline.

In 1972, KASTO developed the first programmable bar stock cassette storage system worldwide, which was able to distinguish between round, flat and oval metal bars, to feed the bars in the needed quantity to a saw and to sort the remnants. Since then, the company consistently contin-ued on this path with always new additional functions like heat management, perpetual inventory, optimization strategies and much more.

In the 80s, industrial sawing moved more and more to the forefront of the process and value-added chain. Some companies moved their saws from the outside of the factory, where mass-production was part of the premanufacturing, and integrated them into their machine parks. Oth-ers outsourced these jobs to steel distributors. Because whoever mass-produced and commis-sioned the steel instead of just handled the steel, achieved a much better profit and strengthened the relationship with the customer. But prerequisite was a systematic inventory management and an optimized space management, which was solved with the SSZ (StolzerSawingCenter) from KASTO. The SSZ was the new product on the world market in 1981.

Because space is money and often very limited, KASTO's idea to use vertical space in the form of high rise storage systems was utilized more and more. Because these systems do not only save space, they also save access time by traveling shorter distances. Accessing locations in six, eight or ten m height and up to 20 or 30 m in lengths with up to 500 storage positions was the answer at start of this development. At that time, the program sequence was still based on punch cards. Since then, solutions have become much more complex: Variable in the selection of the operating system and the database, systems with up to 25,000 storage positions are managed by the KASTOlvr and the capacity can be increased constantly. Today, many KASTO customers interface their automatic central storage system with their manual storage systems. If the soft-ware recognizes that a predetermined inventory quantity falls below the limit, the forklift driver in the manual storage area is informed via radio how much has to be added and where it is stored.