TUBE NEWS TN May 2019 | Page 4

Robots ensure a consistently high, certified standard of quality in cassette production. On-Site Production of Industrial Warehouse Cassettes is Economical and Environmentally Friendly Kasto, the German manufacturer of computer controlled, multi-level systems for automatically storing and retrieving material in stockholding operations and factories, has introduced a new service whereby it will produce parts of its Unicompact system at the customer’s premises. The only prerequisites are sufficient space, a crane and a 400 volt, three-phase electricity supply. On-site production is available in the UK and Ireland through Kasto’s subsidiary in Milton Keynes. The service is carried out within the user’s warehouse area and involves the supplier’s engineers assembling and robotically welding the box-shaped cassettes in which bar, tube or other long stock will be contained. Transporting flat sheet metal avoids having to move large amounts of fresh air by lorry, as is the case if the items are preassembled, reducing the cost of delivery and lowering the environmental impact through fewer vehicle journeys. 4 TUBE NEWS May 2019 The option is economically viable for medium- to large-capacity storage systems. As the cassettes are manufactured next to the warehouse structure that will contain them, the customer can start using them immediately they are ready and can even procure the raw materials to save even more cost. Moreover, the user constantly has a first hand, real time overview of how the project is progressing. One of the first companies to use the new concept was Vereinigte Baustoff- und Eisen GmbH (VBE) in