Medical engineering company invests in automated storage systems

History

Stryker are leaders in the worldwide orthopedic

market and placed at the forefront of medicine's most promising solutions. Stryker Orthopedics are based in Cork and Limerick, Ireland. Each of these sites are state-of-the-art productions facilities for the manufacturing of high quality medical products. The storage of Stryker's products is an important issue as it requires a storage system that does not encroach on its much needed production floor space.

Solution

Stryker investigated the automated vertical storage

market and chose Hanel to provide solutions to their storage needs with an automated vertical storage system. Hanel have commissioned and installed a total of 15 Hänel

Lean-Lifts and Hänel Rotomats throughout Stryker's three sites.

The Lean-Lifts at these sites are used to store products of varying sizes; the Hänel Lean-Lift is able to store such products whilst saving 80% of valuable floor space. This allows Stryker to utilize its valuable and sought after production space within the existing facility area.

Hanel have supplied various bespoke software solutions to each of Stryker's facilities.

Moreover, they have integrated this software with Stryker Instruments' AS400 Warehouse Management System to further enhance the pick/replenish operation. This provided further savings in time and labor costs which, combined with the massive space savings, gave Stryker a huge return on investment.

Supply Chain Manager Gerry Dempsey comments on the installation of the Hänel equipment: "Since installing our Lean-Lifts and Rotomats, we have saved considerable floor storage space, reduced our search times for items and improved our cycle counting accuracy. The equipment has also provided us with the confidence to work with ourraw material suppliers on more frequent Kanban schedules."