Egemin will supply automated guided vehicles as part of its contract with Synutra France.

Egemin has been chosen to design and implement a turnkey intralogistics system for the new plant of Synutra France, a French-Chinese producer of milk powder.

Synutra France is currently building what it claims will be the world's largest milk powder production plant in Brittany, France.

By 2015, the new plant will produce up to 300,000 T of milk powder annually for the Chinese market.

The system Egemin is designing will take care of the automated management, transport and sortage of all flows of raw materials, finished products and consumables. Egemin will deliver an automated warehouse installation, conveyor systems and AGVs that will provide transport between the various process stages.

The value of the contract is undisclosed.

Egemin has also added four new models to its standard E'gv (as AGVs are known at Egemin) product range. The new models can lift heavier loads at higher heights, enabling them to be used in a wider range of applications than the models they replace.

The first vehicles will be deployed at customer sites this month.

The single mast vehicles, FLV2012/N and FLV2012/S, now carry loads up to 1.25 T, or 250 kg (55l lb.) more than the previous models. They lift loads up to two metres (6.6 ft.) high, double what they used to be able to do. The double mast versions, FLV3310/N and FLV3310/S, lift up to 1T and go up to 3.3 m (10.8 ft.) high.

"Our E'gv factory, our manufacturing and testing plant for E'gvs, is running at full speed at the moment. We have quite a number of vehicles under construction and multiple systems are being tested simultaneously before they are shipped to the customer," says product manager Gunter Van Deun.

Egemin Automation sells between 150 and 250 vehicles per year and installs about 40 to 50 systems annually.