Automated Sheet Metal Storage Doubles Efficiency in Fabrication Shops

Efficiency claims are easy to make and hard to verify, so let us be specific about what doubles when a fabrication shop moves from manual sheet handling to automated tower storage. It is not the cutting speed — a fibre laser cuts at the same rate either way. What changes is everything around the cut: how long the machine waits for material, how many people it takes to feed it, and how much floor space is tied up in stock that sits idle.

Automated sheet metal storage doubles efficiency by removing the waiting from the work cycle. Herochu’s HC-A series combines vertical storage, gantry robot loading and a material cart into one flow, and this article breaks down where the time, labour and space come from — and how the arithmetic works out in practice.

The Manual Baseline: Where the Hours Go

In a typical job shop, every sheet that reaches a laser passes through the same sequence. Someone reads the cutting list, walks to the rack, confirms the gauge by label or caliper and flags a forklift driver. The forklift travels to the rack, lifts a bundle and lays it at the machine. The operator then positions the sheet on the bed, aligns it against the stops and starts the program. For a 3000 × 1500 mm plate, that round trip routinely runs five to ten minutes — and that is only the loading half. Add unloading, remnant handling and the searches for material that never turns up where the inventory sheet says it should, and a two-laser shop can spend several shifts a week simply moving steel around.

The Automated Cycle, Step by Step

Watch the same operation on a Herochu system and the sequence changes completely. The operator enters a request on the control panel, or the request arrives automatically from the production schedule. The tower’s PLC identifies the tray, retrieves it and delivers the sheet to the access bay — a cycle that completes in under 60 seconds. The gantry robot’s loading arm extends, lifts the sheet with vacuum lifters and sets it on the material cart. The cart transfers to the laser at 5–15 m/min, the arm places the sheet on the bed at a horizontal speed of 10–30 m/min, and the cut starts. From request to cut, the sheet moves without a forklift and without a person in the path. Lifting speed of 5–10 m/min and fork opening/closing of 5–20 m/min are deliberately moderate: fast enough to keep the cycle tight, gentle enough to protect the material and the machine.

What Actually Doubles

Three effects compound into the headline number. First, machine utilisation: a laser that waited ten minutes between sheets can now start its next job within about two minutes, pushing cutting hours per shift from a typical 60–70 percent toward 90 percent or more on a well-sequenced batch. Second, labour: the operator who used to chase material is reassigned to part checking, program setup or a second machine, and on a Herochu cell one person can supervise the tower, the cart and the robots together. Third, floor space: a tower holding eight to ten layers of 3000 × 1500 mm or 6000 × 2000 mm stock replaces racks and bundles spread across the hall, freeing the footprint for another machine or for work-in-progress storage. When a shop applies all three at once, doubling throughput per square metre is a realistic outcome rather than a slogan.

Payback Math Without the Hype

Work through a conservative example. A shop runs two lasers, two shifts, five days a week. Assume the automated system recovers one hour of idle time per machine per shift — modest compared with the ten-minute loading cycles it replaces. That is ten machine-hours a day returned to cutting, roughly 2,400 hours a year across both machines. At typical contract-cutting rates, those hours cover the system’s cost in a timeframe most fabricators find acceptable — before counting the labour reallocated away from forklift duty or the stock accuracy that stops re-orders of “lost” plate. The point is not one universal ROI figure; it is that the payback rests on machine hours, and a Herochu tower system produces those hours directly.

When the Doubling Is Realistic

Realistic expectations matter. The doubling applies to throughput per machine and per square metre, and to labour productivity — not to cutting speed itself. The gain is highest where changeovers are frequent: job shops cutting mixed gauges and grades, where every new sheet means a rack trip. It is also high where several lasers share one material supply, because synchronisation lets one automatic sheet metal tower storage system and one cart keep two or three machines busy from a single stock point. Shops cutting long single-material batches still benefit from storage density and stock control, but the time savings concentrate in the changeover.

Model Fit for Common Sheet Sizes

Layer count, clearance, load rating and the number of towers are all customised to the shop’s sheet sizes and batch patterns, with single-sheet weight up to 500 kg and transfer speeds of 5–15 m/min as the working envelope. Herochu quotes the configuration only after the cutting schedule is on the table. The efficiency target is designed in from the start rather than hoped for after installation.

Automated sheet metal storage doubles efficiency in the places that matter: machine hours, labour hours and floor area. Herochu delivers the tower, gantry robot and material cart as one synchronised system, and the specification work starts with the shop’s actual cutting schedule. That is where the doubling begins.