Abstract
The tokai logistics center (Maruta Transport Co., Ltd.) is 20866 sqm site with 10000 sqm accommodation. One of the mainly warehoused items is coil. Before introduction of a new inventory system, operators needed to crawl under a pile of coils to check the bar-coded tags. The manner practiced there was unsafe and quite inefficient for the workers; in spite of the fact that automated transportation crane position management systems had been employed effectively at many other warehouses. Now high-performance computers with a smooth three-dimensional displaying capability are readily available in the market and that is the main reason we created “The Maruta Tokai Warehouse Inventory Management System” to eradicate the above mentioned time-consuming and risky operations there. In 2004, we completed the new system that showed warehouse situation to the crane operators in real-time. Outline of the system, the method of warehouse management and principle of the crane navigation is described in this paper.
