In a year that has been remarkable for its bad news, Pony has maintained and built on its conviction that “only with investment and continuous improvement will we succeed in fulfilling our promise of quality and reliability to those who place their trust in our products”.
On 6 August the company’s new photovoltaic system started operating, allowing it to cut emissions of 34,450 kg of CO2, equivalent to planting more than 1,000 trees. This energy is used both for Pony’s own in-house production and to be fed into the national network.
By the end of this year, Pony reported it will be able to say that all its machines are being produced using solar energy.
And Pony innovation doesn’t stop there. In June, Pony finished installation of two vertical warehouses in its premises, 7 metres. high, which will stock materials, previously stocked horizontally over 500 sq. metres.
The main benefit of a vertical warehouse, said Pony, is to optimise space: “You save between 80 and 90% of floor surface, and you save on volume, because a traditional warehouse must has aisles and does not exploit the hangar’s height, especially when the goods have to be at eyeline for the pick-up.
The picking concept is reversed as it is no longer the warehouse operator who goes to pick up the goods, but the goods go directly to the warehouse worker. This is a remarkable time saving because the operators stay by the automatic warehouse and don’t have to move to pick up or deposit goods, moving loads of goods around.
Another big advantage of this system is the cleanliness and the organisation: everything is placed in drawers and the warehouse is locked, therefore all the items are better preserved and protected.
Pick-up and deposit are managed directly by the system receiving data from the company management system and therefore also the FIFO operations are automated. The system brings more productivity to the whole department consistently reducing ‘dead times’ like the movement from one shelf to the other; the system presents a pick-up drawer to the operator while moving to the next one, not subjecting the operator to long waits.
