ITW Group is a Fortune 200 company with a hundred-year history, with seven businesses — including automotive components, food equipment, test and measurement and electronics, and polymers and fluids — across 57 countries around the world, and 50,000 employees in total. This automated high-bay warehouse project serves the Fastener Division of ITW Group, whose main customers include GM, Volkswagen, NIO, Great Wall, and other mainstream traditional automakers and new-energy vehicle makers. As the business has grown year after year, the existing warehouse space and staffing of ITW Group's fastener business in China can no longer meet business needs, so a digital-intelligent warehousing and logistics solution is needed to expand storage space and reduce reliance on labor.
Against this backdrop, ATOMIX has joined hands with the Fastener Division of ITW Group to jointly build a 19 m high-density pallet shuttle warehouse that can be expanded to more than 20,000 pallet storage locations in the future, supports 24-hour continuous inbound and outbound operations, and allows system capacity to be flexibly scaled by adding more shuttles. In addition to the 12 pallet shuttles, 7 lifts and software system mentioned above, the overall solution also includes 3 machine-vision picking robotic arms, 1 pallet conveyor system, 1 bin sorting system and a combined racking system. This intelligent high-density warehouse project deploys a pallet shuttle storage area, a bin picking area and an outbound buffer area, enabling automated pallet inbound storage of finished goods and purchased parts and bin picking and outbound for the customer. It helps the customer meet the warehousing and logistics challenges of the fastener business — many item types, high volume and high frequency — and delivers efficient use of storage slot space, effective savings in labor costs, efficient order fulfillment, and digitalized management of warehousing and logistics.
The ITW Group and ATOMIX project teams present at the ceremony held full discussions on key project milestones, technical difficulties, communication mechanisms, and construction safety, among other topics. The General Manager of ITW Group said that ITW Group headquarters has high expectations for the Shanghai automated high-bay warehouse project, noting that the project is a first of its kind across ITW's business footprint in China and even worldwide. It represents ITW Group's active exploration of using advanced digital-intelligent logistics technology to reshape its supply chain and improve warehouse management efficiency. He expressed the hope that the project, once completed, will become a benchmark project, and that colleagues from across the automotive industry will be welcome to visit and exchange ideas when the time comes. “Choosing your company as a partner comes from valuing your technological innovation capability and your pragmatic, cooperative team.”
ATOMIX's head of domestic integrated sales said: “We are very glad to cooperate with an outstanding world-class company like ITW. ATOMIX's pallet shuttle solution has gained another new application scenario in the automotive fastener industry. ATOMIX will strictly follow management standards and processes and strive to make this project a model project. We are a serious and responsible AI company, and we will use our technical capabilities and quality resources to guarantee the project's delivery, actively empowering ITW Shanghai's business development.”