Application of Automation Solution in Furniture Industry

For a long time, raw material management has been a difficult problem for plastics furniture manufacturers. Because of the variety of furniture models and colors, as well as the order arbitrariness, furniture manufacturers have to make efforts to meet all kinds of the requirements. However, due to the forgoing reasons, the recipes and masterbatch changes frequently and in succession the production site will be in utter disorder. These all lead to waste of raw materials and large quantity of wrong and defective products, then the production efficiency will be greatly reduced.

A furniture manufacturing company in South Africa, with more than 180 injection molding machines, its products includes almost all household plastic products. In recent years, with the increasing costs of raw material and labor, the company feels under great pressure and seeks around for solutions of materials management. Shini is honor to be chosen as the solution provider. By face to face communication, Shini came up with a preliminary scheme and got full recognition form the costumer. Afterwards, Shini sent its engineer to the factory in South Africa to make an on-the-spot investigation and to finalize the final scheme.

With over 10 kinds of raw material, scores of formulations and hundreds of colors, the replacement is very frequent. The factory has been using more than one hundred blenders to manually blend the raw material and masterbatch. In the workshops, raw materials and masterbatch piled everywhere and workers are busy carrying and blending them. To solve all the problems, Shini provides the following programs:

• Plan large-scale storage tanks outside the workshop and store the raw material in them through a positive pressure system. The capacity of the tank is design to the feeding amount of one month.

• According to the layout of injection molding machine, a steel frame is built from south to north and according to the structure of the plant, the corresponding machines is divided into five regions.

• In each region, there are 5 gravimetric blenders and install a 500kg storage bin under each of them.

• Each injection molding machine is equipped with a tailor-made doser with fast refueling device and material shortage alarm.

The processing of raw material are as follows:

With precise distribution and flexible recipes, the whole system can choose and change materials quickly and conveniently. So far, since the project completed in May, 2011, the system has helped our customer save significant costs in manpower and raw materials and receives acclaims from them.