Carts on a Roll
During the "Pulse of Packaging" workshop at NEXPO'97, Lewis "Woody" Schuler, packaging-center manager for The Times Picayune of New Orleans, revealed that his newspaper now uses some 1,500 carts to facilitate its microzoning.
Many newspapers, particularly those heavily into zoning, use carts to transport bundles to their regional distribution centers. Carts, which hold significantly fewer bundles than pallets, allow managers to target zoning more precisely.
NEXPO'97 attendees found two primary manufacturers of cart loaders on the exhibit floor--Cannon Equipment Co. of Rosemount, Minn., and Quipp Systems Inc. of Miami. In addition, Sitma USA Inc., St. Paul, Minn., introduced a new robotic cart loader.
They are not friendly competitors--Quipp sued Cannon several weeks ago for patent infringement. While company spokespeople refused to go into details, the technology in contention relates to the way the "fingers" or "forks" on Cannon's NCL Series II Cart Loader accept bundles and lower them into waiting carts.
For the loading process, external conveyors transport individually strapped bundles from various packaging lines to the cart loader's in-feed conveyor. Empty wheeled carts are presented to the cart loader, pushed manually or automatically from an optional empty-cart storage system.
Approximately 40 bundles per minute can be moved by cart loaders built by Cannon and Quipp. Upon completion, full or partially loaded carts are automatically discharged from the loader and ready for manual delivery to a truck position.
In 1988, The Miami Herald became the first daily to employ carts when it purchased 3,500 units from Cannon. The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, which already had about 1,000 carts, purchased 11 auto loaders from Cannon in 1991.
Today, approximately 50 U.S. papers use carts, but only about 15 percent employ cart loaders, estimated Cannon national sales manager Pat Geraghty, because most older mailrooms are designed with conveyors that run right to the truck and don't have room for auto loaders.
In addition to facilitating zoning, cart loaders reduce back strain, thereby reducing worker-compensation claims.
Cannon is the only company that builds both carts and loaders.
Quipp manufactures cart loaders and acquires its carts from Memphis-based Baird Manufacturing. Baird has built carts for 50 years, primarily for use in the bakery, dairy and automotive industries.
The Sitma cart loader is capable of 32 bundles per minute and designed for minimum movement in all axes. It can handle bundle heights of 6, 8, 10, 12 or 14 inches.
Rosalind C. Truitt, Presstime staff writer. E-mail, truir@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1684; fax, (703) 902-1690.