Business sector: production of kitchens and interior design
Location: Macerata – Italy
Founded in 1967 thanks to the intuition and expertise of its two founding partners, in just a few years Lube Industries became an established company with a well-known brand, widely appreciated for the quality of its products.
The company was restructured in 1993 and established GruppoLUBE, which continued to grow and to achieve ambitious goals: today it is among the top three Italian kitchen manufacturers and first for the number of kitchens produced each year.
Currently, the heart of the company is a modern factory in the province of Macerata: 130,000 square metres of floor space, 100,000 of which is covered, with more than 550 employees. With more than 1,600 points of sale in Italy and steadily expanding in the international market, Lube still adheres to the values that have been at the heart of its corporate philosophy since its establishment: focus on people and on the quality, functionality and safety of the place they live in.
Always aware that innovation is the driving force behind constant growth, Lube Industries asked Wipro Ferretto to design and make its new storage system for wood panels. With one main goal: to obtain space for a new production line.
Wipro Ferretto's staff supported the customer from the earliest commissioning stages, designing and building a significantly sized self-supporting automatic storage system for the cutting lines. The 149 m long and 21 m high system can store and handle wood panel packs of various sizes, ranging from a minimum area of 3.3m2 to a maximum area of 12.3m2, with a maximum weight of 4,500kg.
The stacker cranes for the racking, which is designed to support up to 70,000 kg on each frame, were therefore equipped with 2 fork sets made up of 3 forks each.
In addition, to ensure maximum functionality, a picking system with suction cups positioned inside the racking allows panels to be singled out and then transferred to the cutting lines for further processing.
The new automated system was designed to efficiently manage the storage of panel packs of various sizes. In addition to increasing operating efficiency, this solution has allowed Lube to free up space for new cutting lines in the production department.
Automation also ensures maximum safety in the workplace, which was one of the company’s fundamental requirements, given also the type of unit loads to be handled.