Several of the gates located on the overhead bottle conveyor tended to jam easily. Clearing jams meant that someone had to find a ladder, clear the area, then climb the ladder to clear the jam or work on the equipment. Over time, ladders were left in place causing valuable floor storage space to be lost. Kroger approached Maddox for a fix to the situation.

Company Profile

The Kroger Company, headquartered in Cincinnati, OH, with a dairy location in Indianapolis, is one of the largest nationwide grocery chains. As part of its company strategy, Kroger manufactures some of the items it sells.

Technical Situation

Extending an existing platform and building a new one seemed to be obvious answers, but Kroger had bigger goals. They wanted to have no part of the new structures extend to the ground so that there was no danger of hitting the platforms with forklifts or losing valuable storage space.

Maddox was asked to design platforms that utilized existing building and roof structure for support. Kroger also asked that the design would eradicate the need for further fall protection when working on the platform.

This room is part of a working dairy, requiring installation to have minimal interruption to floor operations.

Trades Required

Fabricators, Millwrights.

Solution

Maddox presented conceptual ideas for approval. Once the ideas were approved, detailed drawings were made and the platforms were pre-fabricated in the Maddox shop.

A cage was made around one platform to allow workers to move to and from different elevations safely and without fall protection. The other platform was created to be built around existing fire mains and lockers while providing the elevation change required to access conveyors.

The entire installation was performed in less than a week while production continued in the room.

Benefits

By providing an engineered platform design, Maddox was able to keep production costs down by pre-fabricating the platforms and installing them quickly.