Sometime in the next 18 to 22 months, Gator Millworks will open a new 50,000-square-foot facility on Florida Avenue and Juban Road in Livingston Parish and unveil its new state-of-the-art, six-figure inventory storage and retrieval system.
The new, German-made automated Intellistore system will manage the company’s wood inventory, increase productivity and make it’s old forklift operations obsolete, says company president Chad Foster.
“All this is going to help us be more efficient for every job,” Foster says, adding the automated system “allows us to take on more work” and “place people in other areas of the company.”
Wood will be moved by a large robotic arm outfitted with suction cups under the new system. A series of rails will be attached to the walls of a 1,500-square-foot fenced-in area, where no workers can reach, for the arm to move about, Foster says. The arm will carry plywood from the stacks to the receiving end of panel saws for cutting. There will also be designated drop zones outside the fence where new materials will be unloaded and placed for the system to bring inside the fenced-in storage area.
Foster says the system eliminates the need for employees to oversee the inventory in the warehouse, saving the company time and money it costs to train new hires. The system also ensures pieces of plywood needed for each work day are ready each morning. It even stacks the wood so that the pieces needed first are at the top of the pile.
For example, if the company has an order for a white oak shelf and the white oak plywood is buried beneath a hundred other pieces of plywood, then the automated system will work overnight to move each piece of plywood until it reaches the white oak and places those pieces at the panel saw where the wood will be cut.
“So when you come in the next day for your shift, that material is ready to go,” Foster says.
Foster says he believes there are only about 15 systems in the United States, after they were developed in Germany about 10 years ago. He began seeing them at trade shows a few years ago and began looking into the technology.
Foster is mum on the exact price of the new system, saying only that it cost more than $100,000 and adding that each automated system is built to different specifications, meaning what GatorWorks paid for its system may not be comparable to what other companies using the technology have paid.
The move to a new facility is necessitated by limited space at the company’s current building on La. 16 near Denham Springs High School, where it has been continuously expanding for 20 years. Foster says he began searching for a larger space two years ago. Gator Millworks is a full-service architectural woodworking company that handles both residential and commercial jobs.
See a video of an Intellistore machine in action.
—Ryan Broussard
