Vitale Barberis Canonico – A prestigious warehouse

LCS carries out the revamping of the warehouse of the headquarter of one of the oldest woolen mills in the world.
The warehouse today boasts greater productivity, effectiveness and efficiency to meet the growing needs of customers.

The company and the needs:

The wool business of the Barberis Canonico family began in 1663 in Pratrivero, in the province of Biella, from where it has never moved, building generation after generation one of the world’s leading textile companies. In 2013 the company became part of the prestigious international club reserved for family businesses with at least two hundred years of history, Les Hénokiens.

For its prestigious production, the company has about 500 employees in 2 factories in the Biella area: in the historic site in Pratrivero and in the separate production unit in Pray.

In 2017 the woolen mill produced over 10 million meters of fabric with over 3,000 variations. Such a production requires a perfect warehouse. Customers order the pieces of cloth for tailoring production almost in just-in-time and the supply must be timely.

Vitale Barberis Canonico constantly seeks the improvement of services to its customers and already in 2017 begun the analyzes for a structural change to the automatic yarn warehouse.

The company analyzed with LCS the ideal solutions to meet a whole series of needs that production and the market made necessary. With its structural and software interventions, LCS has responded brilliantly to the need to increase storage capacity. At the same time, LCS has improved the efficiency of enslavement of the semi-finished yarn to the warping and weaving departments and to refine the picking process.

The project

A profound and complete revamping intervention of the existing automatic warehouse was carried out with stacker cranes that presented mechanical, positioning, low performance and unavailable spare parts problems. At the beginning of the works, the intensive yarn warehouse consisted of 3 stacker cranes and 3,024 pallet spaces, thanks to the project designed and implemented by LCS it was possible to make various changes, such as:

  1. Storage capacity expansion with plant housed in a new building: addition of 2 stacker cranes enslaved to 4 new shelving fronts for a total of 2,106 pallet spaces.
  2. Complete refurbishment of the internal and external conveyors to the warehouse for a drastic increase in the performance of the Udc extraction circuits:
    – Replacement of the warehouse head at the weaving and warping levels
    – Insertion of a recirculation ring and new picking / contropicking carousels
    – Insertion of a double shuttle able to manage the entire head of 5 stacker cranes
  3. Mechanical and functional integration of existing external systems.
  4. Complete makeover of the LogiWare software: for the management of the new UdC handling functions, according to the same communication and data exchange logics (“transactions”) with the company information system.
  5. Arrangement for future expansions of the UdC handling circuit with particular reference to the warehouse side of the warping side.

Benefits


The technological revamping of the warehouse has led to:
  • More control over the product
  • Greater safety for operators according to the best current standards
  • Handling flows consistent with the extreme service needs required by international customers

Efficiency and elegance

With structural and software interventions, LCS has increased storage capacity, has reduced and guaranteed order fulfillment times for a greater customer satisfaction, and has also simplified the picking of pieces of fabric for the tailoring world as well as improved the operator safety and finally prepared the environment for future expansions.

The warehouse today expresses as a whole greater productivity, effectiveness and efficiency to meet the growing needs of customers.

Case History