Hanging garment warehouse: 55,440 positions on three floors
How a circulating chain conveyor – the “snake” – stores and retrieves hanging garments between the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floor, driven by the customer’s WMS.
The task
The customer needed to store a large volume of hanging garments on three floors while dispatching goods quickly per order. The solution is 3 independent branches of an overhead system, each with 18,480 positions at a 33 mm pitch – 55,440 positions in total. Each conveyor is approximately 210 m long.
The circulating snake between floors
At the input stations goods are hung on hangers and the chain conveyor carries them into storage. The inclined conveyor is a single endless loop: one branch snakes upward through all three floors, the other returns downward beside it. A transfer on each floor stores from the rising branch and retrieves onto the descending one – so in a single flow goods can be handed in on the 1st floor while others are collected from the 3rd.
WMS-driven dispatch
The customer’s WMS decides which goods to release. They leave the storage track onto the transfer and continue down the incline to sorting. At the output garments are sequenced per request and individual orders are separated by an empty coloured hanger.