At this year's IMHX international materials handling and logistics exhibition, held at Birmingham's national exhibition centre in March, Kasto won the BITA (British Industrial Truck Association)-sponsored IMHX Design 4 Safety Award 2013 in the category: Specialist Winner, Racking & Storage. The certificate was signed by James Clark, secretary-general of BITA and Rob Fisher, a director of the show organisers, Informa Exhibitions.
The accolade was presented to Ernst Wagner, managing director of Kasto in Milton Keynes, the UK subsidiary of German storage system and sawing machine manufacturer, Kasto GmbH. It was received for the company's Unitower automated storage and retrieval system for long stock.
Supporting the entry was a report on a double Unitower system at the Rotherham factory of mechanical seal manufacturer, Aesseal, for storing stainless steel and superalloy bar, tube and billet in a compact footprint. Presentation of material at an ergonomic height in front of the towers reduces risk of injury to operators in addition to speeding delivery to machine tools for maximum productivity.
For handling stock that is too heavy to lift out by hand, Kasto supplied special slings so that items could be picked using either an electric hand pallet truck or a counterbalance handling trolley. A particular problem was how to access heavy, short billets that are difficult to sling. The solution devised by Kasto was to make the base of several cassettes loose in one of the stores and to build a hydraulic lifting mechanism into the output station.
The criterion for entry to the award was: to provide the strongest evidence of making a measurable contribution to the level of safety awareness, or rate of incident reduction, in materials handling operations.
A spokesperson for the expert judging panel said: "The Kasto Unitower is a genuinely safety focused and positive contribution to storing and manipulating material which normally is a nightmare to handle."
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