Welcome to the EuroSort Flex Drive System
EuroSort designed our Flex Drive System from the ground up to improve on the limitations of traditional belt driven system that were holding sorters back from their true potential. These mainly centered around 2 main points, sorter length limitations and the inability to change elevations. We will cover each point in more detail below.
Freedom from Sorter Length Limitations
Flexibility in design is only as good as the hardware restrictions allow, and in this case, that was the maximum length that the belt could be in our traditional belt or a chain driven system. By eliminating the belt and using a series of distributed drives in our Flex Drive System, EuroSort no longer has a maximum length of our sorters. We now have the ability to design completely according to the operation and facility needs, regardless of the sorter length that requires.
Whether the sorter is 50 feet or a ¼ mile long, our Flex Drive System can handle it. This elimination of maximum sorter length also leads to more flexibility in sorter design and a huge degree of customization to each customer’s needs.
The Flexibility to Change Elevation
One of the main constraints with traditional belt driven systems is the inherent lack of ability to travel in more than one dimension, the belt just cannot bend like that. This constraint restricts the layout to a simple racetrack design, either a rectangle or an oval like we see to the right This type of layout can actually be the right choice for many of our customers, and we have seen that sorters using this layout can be incredible space efficient if the length of the building if sufficient to fit the number of destinations required.
For operations that have to sort roughly 3000 items per hour our Push Bar sorter or Single Split tray sorter could be the right solution. Depending on your product size and weight, you will find that either one of these solutions will bring efficiencies to your operations. The Single Split Tray will give you the added advantage of scalability in case your business grows to the next level.
BUT, as the e-com boom pushed the average items/order down, the number of destinations required to maintain pick efficiency grew, and sorters got longer and longer. With a belt drive system, if the sorter with the required number of destinations does not fit in the building in a racetrack configuration, then you are out of luck. Our Flex Drive System’s ability to incline and decline now gives us the ability to fold racetrack type layouts over on themselves and create what we call our folded figure-8 layouts or even our goggles layout (pictured left)
By folding the sorter back in on itself, and inclining/declining over another leg of the sorter, we can fit almost 2x as many destinations on the same sorter. This ability has helped many customers as we can provide a system that has 2x as many destinations in the same footprint as many other competitive systems.
This desire to fit more in less space is only increasing as warehouse space gets increasingly more expensive, and brands try to handle more volumes in the same space. Creatively fitting more functionality into the same space is one of Eurosort’s biggest strengths, and a great example of this is from the largest sporting good distributor in UK.
This customer only had a 9 ft tall mezzanine level that was available for automation. Based on the number of required destinations, and the required throughput, their sorter needed to allow the induction operators to stand on the floor (the only way to maintain the 7 foot clear height required for OSHA) and then incline up to sort height at 7 ft. The flexibility to change elevation gained by the EuroSort Flex Drive System allowed us to come up with a solution for this customer that gave them a 6 month ROI and allowed them to continue growing their business.