Automotive supplier of drivetrain components. Subassembly staging for production

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The customer greatly improved machining cycle times with the addition of new CNC machining lines but these time savings were significantly reduced by the time the product was ready for shipping. It was soon realized that because the machine outputs were much faster the result was more subassemblies stored all over the plant floor. Now, the process bottleneck was handling the subassembly product flow. The time lost on handling the subassemblies translated to time lost on every machine in the process.


More fork trucks with new workers or using existing workers and more overtime. The problem with this approach was the increased cost to handle the subassemblies was eliminating the benefit of the better cycle times of the new machines. Also, fork trucks were already used for multiple jobs that always created a challenge to find a fork truck when one was desperately needed.


One (1) 2,000 lb. Capacity Prostak system #P2C-330-216.5-4242-9 with video camera pallet alignment system.


The small footprint and dense storage of the Prostak system allowed for a strategically placed storage “buffer” work cell adjacent to the work flow and machines. This cleaned up the floor space around the machines that were cluttered with bins and dunnage racks of the various subassemblies. This allowed for a more organized process. More importantly, product flow was more easily monitored, controlled and adjusted when using the Prostak system as the staging and buffer work cell. A side benefit was that the Prostak system freed up more floor space for additonal machines.