When Smith & Nephew, one of the UK's largest medical device companies, needed to urgently install a powered pallet conveyor system at its Hull factory it called in Leicester based materials handling specialist, CI Logistics. Smith & Nephew's sterile products are packed into caged pallets with a plastic base and these needed to be transported from a mezzanine in the company's factory on one side of a busy road to its packing and warehouse operation on the other side of the road. Once emptied, the cages then needed to be returned to the factory for the whole operation to begin again. The company already had an existing conveyor system which transported the cages across the road via a link bridge. The conveyor had been installed over 20 years ago and then mothballed for almost a decade due to changes in the company's manufacturing techniques. As part of the materials handling contract, this legacy system would need to be resurrected and incorporated into a new, fully automated solution.
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