Wine Cellar Innovations (WCI) is located in the historic Linwood neighborhood of Cincinnati, OH and occupy what was the LeBlond Aircraft Engine Corporation’s factory. WCI focuses on building custom wine racks for commercial and high end residential wine cellars, from scratch. Just because each unit is hand built, doesn’t mean that they don’t use automation and efficient systems to build their product.
Most wine racks are built with short sticks of wood. In order to turn large stock into small pieces, several cuts have to be made. After each cut the wood needs to be inspected for imperfections and damage. Between a length cut operation and a planar, the parts had been queued in bins and moved from one machine to the next. The operator would load the planar and reject the bad parts. This created excess WIP inventory, excessive bending, and potential for backup between operations. WCI called on Conveyer & Caster to help them solve this problem.
