Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

Articles in this series about Industry 4.0 have shown how precast production facilities can draw step by step closer to the next stage of the industrial revolution. In this process, vision must always be measured against practical relevance and economic efficiency. Viewing the valueadded chain as a whole is an important principle with Industry 4.0. This applies particularly to the ongoing progression from an architect’s drawing through production right up to a construction site – the keyword being Building Information Modelling (BIM). For a precast production facility, this means that the entire process, from receiving the order data through the processing stations right up to outside storage, should be taken into consideration as a whole. There is little point in improving individual stations if congestion then occurs in front of the next station or if precast components are not produced in the right sequence and have to be placed into intermediate storage for an unnecessarily long time. The optimum is a uniform flow of pallets through the system. In this context, this is referred to as “cycle time homogenisation”. Pallet utilisation is the main controlling element in pallet flow. The following will discuss the relationships between pallet utilisation, pallet flow and cycle times.