Eight ABUS EOT cranes in an aluminium profile plant

Hydro Building Systems France (HBSF) is the French daughter company of the Norwegian group Hydro (www.hydro.com) and employs 1,650 employees at various locations in France. HBSF supplies metal products to the automobile industry and specialises in developing and producing aluminium profiles for doors, windows, glass roofs, conservatories, and railings and have just recently invested 25 million Euros into a completely new building at Soissons, just northeast of Paris.

This new site consolidates production and logistics in one place making for a far more economic solution where raw materials (profiles) are delivered and stored in a fully automated high rack warehouse with a height of 25 metres.

Hydro Building Systems France has developed a sophisticated automated procedure for the storage of the profiles, for the preparation of orders, and for the control of the painting line. This allows HBSF to keep delivery times to a minimum by reacting speedily to customer specific requirements as to particular paint colourings.

8 ABUS EOT cranes have a key role to play in this ambitious logistics operation: they are used to unload the lorries when the profiles first come in and two EOT cranes are used in packing after the profiles have been painted. Finally the profiles are transferred to dispatch where another two ABUS EOT cranes load the lorries again. The EOT cranes have spans between 23,000 and 29,500 mm and load capacities between 2.5 and 5 tonnes. The types of these EOT cranes are ELKs, single girder cranes of the welded box girder type, and ELS which is a single girder crane as well with a welded box girder but features a so-called side-running trolley.