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Stacking Over Conveyor

Challenges:

When the United States Postal Service needs advice and equipment for letter and flat mail sortation, they turn to the Electronic Systems Division of Northop Grumman Corportation.  And when Northrop Grumman needs help reducing cost and the footprint of their systems  for the USPS, they turn to USS.

Northrop Grumman wanted to accomplish two things: 1) reduce costs by making the system smaller; and 2) gain valuable floor space by reducing the length of the system. These changes would save the USPS a significant amount of money and would help them bring automation to some of their smaller facilities.

Solution:

USS and Northrop Grumman analyzed the situation and discovered that the current system required the totes used for sorting to be stored away from the system until they were needed. USS realized that by using their Stacking Over Conveyor system they could automatically stack and un-stack the totes, allowing multiple totes to be stored in the same amount of floor space that used to only hold one tote.

USS installed a Stacking Over Conveyor Device that could stack four totes at the entrance of the accumulation conveyor, hold those stacks until a tote was needed, and then un-stack them one-at-a-time when they were needed.

Results:

By using two Stacking and Destacking units at each end of the conveyor to reduce the length of the conveyor, USS was able to reduce the overall footprint of the system by 75% and reduce overall system costs by $50,000.