Dexion Case Study

Conveyor Control System

Company Profile

Dexion has over 50 years experience in the design and manufacture of storage and materials handling products, with the company offering total capability across a range of products, designed and manufactured in its own factories. The company operates worldwide, across more than 100 countries, supplying businesses of all sizes in a range of industries, with products suitable for the storage of everything from a few specialist items or parts, to entire warehouse and office installations. It has a network of 33 sales offices throughout the world, supported by 180 distributors in 70 countries.

Business Requirements

One of the products manufactured by Dexion are data driven conveyor control systems for a range of clients. Boxes on the conveyor have a barcode which is read by barcode readers on the system. The barcode is sent to a Windows NT route management system which looks-up up the barcode, determines where the box should go and sends this information back to the control device on the conveyor track. Theses systems handle complex tasks, such as dealing with the low-level box merges, delayed navigation decisions, load balancing, and capacity management. Dexion had a requirement for additional software design and development expertise to help deliver a control system to one of their clients, a clothing manufacturer based in France.

Our Solution

Beacon was asked to assist Dexion by designing and developing software for capacity management, load balancing, batch management and dynamic destination assignment, whereby boxes were directed to particular operators at the last possible moment. The database back-end also required rationalising and optimising. In addition, we implemented an expandable COM plug-in system to add functionality and provide communication between the control devices and the NT route management system. The COM plug-in system rapidly became the core of the routing management system. Beacon developed some firmware for the conveyor side control devices which carried out tasks at the start of the conveyor such as ensuring there was sufficient space for boxes on the track.