Logistics role
March 1st 2005

Astec Conveyors has designed a materials handling system at the Birmingham depot of TNT. The two companies worked together to design a system that would provide an effective, reversible materials handling solution that could be operated by both night and backshift workers.

TNT’s proposed reducing ground floor congestion by installing a mezzanine with a raised sortation conveyor system. Inbound goods are off-loaded from vehicles onto lineshaft conveyors to be indexed to a checkpoint, where they are weighed and their details printed onto delivery/routing label. Parcels are then merged and transported on a common close pitched roller conveyor, up a reversible inclined belt conveyor to mezzanine height.

Astec designed modular merger units with close pitched segmented rollers to minimise ‘dead’ areas.

Outbound parcels are unloaded from trailers and fed onto the sortation system to run in reverse.

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