Floplast Limited was founded in 1991 as a manufacturer of building products specialising in rain water systems; window and cladding; soil and waste together with underground drainage systems which are widely used by major house builders and are specified both locally and nationally to provide the Building Industry with innovative and cost effective solutions for domestic, new build and refurbishment projects. A new green field manufacturing facility was completed in Sittingbourne Kent specialising in extrusion and injection moulding occupying a total area of 200,000 square feet and UPM were selected to install the central material feed and material handling systems having a total project value of circa £400,000.00.

Brian Lynch, Managing Director of Floplast states that automation is the key to the ongoing success of the company with continual investment in new technology and product development to both update and renew their existing systems and to produce new innovative products in a cost efficient manner.

The automatic product handling system designed and installed by UPM concentrated on handling output from some 20 injection moulding machines. Empty tote bins are automatically assigned to each machine to permit unattended production over a 12 hour shift.

A UPM double stacking box loader is located at each machine and each bin has an identifying bar coded label.

Mouldings are counted into each bin, which is then transported to a designated area via a QC station.

The complete system is controlled by an Omron PLC with touch screen and all software was written in-house by UPM to integrate with Datalinx Warehouse Management and Scala Business systems.

Security levels for operators to access the control entail the use of swipe cards bar coded for personal identity recognition.