Go to the pallet building stations in the 600,000-square-foot distribution center HoMedics built in Riverside, Calif., and you'll see something unusual: When a pallet is ready for the stretch wrapper, an automatic transfer vehicle pulls up to the station and waits for an associate to push the full pallet onto the vehicle and remove an empty pallet for the next task before delivering the full pallet to the automatic stretch wrapper.rnWhile transfer cars and automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) are a common way to shuttle pallets between workstations in manufacturing plants, it's not every day you see them in a distribution center. But when HoMedics began to design a new, larger facility in 2007 the company looked for the most efficient and flexible combination of automation and conventional materials handling processes to manage the increase in shipments coming into the Port of Long Beach. Where Long Beach once represented about 35% of HoMedics' distribution, today about 80% of the company's products are shipped directly to customers from California.
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