Product Focus: Intralox ARB Sorter 7000
Author: JJ Phelan, VP of Systems Sales
As each day passes, more and more consumers are buying one or two items at a time, expecting them to show up on the front door the next day, or maybe even the same day. With the continued increase in parcel shipping costs, gone are the days where companies can simply drop those one or two small items in a carton, fill it with popcorn or crushed paper, tape it up, apply a label and send to shipping via a host of conveyors or sortation systems.
Instead, in order to stay competitive with shipping costs, companies have to minimize shipping by using the smallest and least expensive packaging, which means envelopes, polybags, bubble mailers and a host of other “smalls”. For more traditional conveyor and sortation systems, those smalls are extremely challenging!
For those installations, S&H Systems has used Intralox’s 7000 Activated Roller Bed (ARB) technology. Using vector math processes to carry and convey product, the ARB then uses small active wheels or rollers located inside the carrying belt to divert the package in a perpendicular direction off the belt. The result of the two motions equates to a gently angled product flow off of the conveyor.
Other benefits include:
- Maintain precise gaping while aligning, centering or positioning products
- Merging products through multiple infeeds
- Merging products prior to sorting, scanning, labeling or printing operations
- Switching into multiple destination lanes from multiple infeed lanes
The Intralox 7000 ARB sorter can sort parcel smalls at rates up to 12,000 parcels per hour with 99.5+% sort accuracy. Not only can it sort these smalls at this high rate, but it doesn’t require a long footprint for each divert. Depending on the mix of parcels, divert spacing can be as close as 24”.
If your business is processing small packages, with increased volume in shipping to more destinations, and this is challenging your current material handling infrastructure, please reach out to S&H Systems. We’ve designed and installed multiple dozens of these sortation systems for our existing customers. Put our expertise to work for you.