Dematic's Automated Multishuttle Chilled will be used by Australian Lamb Company

Dematic has been chosen to install its Automated Multishuttle Chilled and Frozen Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) in the Colac, Victoria meat processing facility of the Australian Lamb Company (ALC).

One of Australia's leading producers of lamb, ALC produces, supplies and exports lamb products to hotels, resorts, restaurants, butchers and supermarket chains worldwide.

Dematic's Meat Buffer storage and handling solution will provide better visibility of product flow and accuracy, as well as improvement in efficiency at the meat processing facility. The system has features such as automated overheight detection to prevent cartons entering the system that are out of specification, and an electronic interface to ALC's host system for streamlined data exchange.

The Dematic solution was chosen because it met key requirements set out by the consultant engineer, NIRAS, who determined the design of ALC's wider upgrade project and also managed the tender process.

"One of the main challenges for ALC with their existing system was that the process of building, sorting, storing and retrieving SKU pallets was a very time-consuming and manual process performed by staff," says Soeren Schauki, business development manager at Dematic. "Dematic's Multishuttle ASRS solution will automate and simplify this buffer and sortation process by automatically buffering, sorting, storing and retrieving them as pallet lots."

The key benefits of the new solution include increased speed and reduced complexity to build SKU pallets, reduced manual handling, reduced product damage, improved overall productivity and accuracy, and avoiding the need for staff to operate in a freezer environment.

"Multishuttle ASRS is the fastest, most flexible compact solution that is able to buffer and deliver fully sequenced meat cartons to further automation," says Dale Smith, chief financial officer and director at ALC. "And with a simple and proven electronic interface with our host system, Dematic's solution met our operational requirements for the meat processing facility."

Completion of implementation of the Dematic Meat Buffer storage and handling solution is scheduled for March 2019.