New breed of AGVs letting users cast old limitations... -
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Published on: 4/22/2004
Last Visited: 4/22/2004
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch last year had FMC upgrade its fleet of SGVs, retrofitting them with new controls and upgraded software, said Blake Dickie, director of printing operations.
"We had the same vehicles that were originally installed 14 years ago," he said."The system was old and extremely difficult to get support and parts."
FMC replaced the proprietary controls with upgraded software and also converted the vehicles to laser-guided control."They came in, set up the new system and turned it over to us," Dickie said.
The SGVs are now shuttling newsprint rolls back and forth at the Post-Dispatch's Pulitzer Publishing Center in suburban St. Louis.Dickie said the newspaper now anticipates further mining the capabilities of the SGVs, obtaining data about web breaks and consumption reports.
"We had to track these manually before.Now we can get this data automatically," he said.