At Central Steel & Wire’s new 900,000-square-foot warehouse and metals service center near Chicago, a fleet of 20 autonomous, side-loading lift trucks glide through narrow aisles of the site’s new cantilever storage, reliably putting away loads of metal goods that might be 24-feet long and weigh upwards of 7,000 pounds per load.
The units steadily work two shifts per day, automating the process of putting away long containers or “pans” that hold materials like tubes or bar stock into the correct storage locations.
While the automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) can be operated in manual mode, they normally operate in full autonomous mode, using natural feature navigation and sensors to identify specific pans, navigate to locations and understand the contours of the racking, for consistent, damage-free storage of materials.
The fleet of AGVs moving through the storage aisles is perhaps the most noticeable bit of technology in the new facility, located in University Park, Ill., on the southern edge of Chicago’s metro area. It’s not every day you see a fleet of 20 AGVs automating a key workflow at a site this large, with goods this challenging to handle.
Central Steel & Wire, or “CS&W,” is part of Ryerson, a family of companies that distributes and processes metal products. CS&W is a metals service center, which means they take in products from mills and store them until customers need them, in addition to their ability to process material. The new site and its systems are meant to enhance service levels for customers, while lowering operational costs.
University Park replaces a legacy site that used four separate buildings, located closer to Chicago’s inner ring near Midway Airport. Having everything under one roof eliminates interbuilding transfers, says Nicole Giesie, vice president of operations at CS&W, while the new site’s location, strategically chosen on the edge of the metro region, helps avoid traffic snarls to speed up transportation.
“At the former campus, we would use internal shuttle trucks that would move goods between buildings to the main building where we were filling orders and then loading up trucks to bring to our customers or other CS&W or Ryerson facilities,” Giesie says. “Those transfers caused some operational inefficiencies, extra touches and extra labor, to get orders ready for customers, and that wasn’t something we could easily overcome given the design.”
University Park’s layout is designed around a narrow aisle storage strategy for its long metal SKUs using cantilever racking (Steel King) with the layout designed though a Steel King partner (Container Systems Inc. or “CSi”). The rack infrastructure was designed to support the use of the fleet of 20 AGV lift trucks (Combilift).
The site continues to use some manual lift trucks for order filling and handling of flat stock, but the intent with the University Park design was to begin leveraging AGVs from the start, to bring a greater level of operational efficiency. By first targeting what could be most easily automated with the autonomous units, the AGVs free up people experienced with heavy machinery and metals order fulfillment for the outbound workflows so crucial in the metals service center business.
“We often send out close to 100 trucks a day, so keeping that outbound workflow running smoothly and efficiently is key to success for us,” Giesie says.
Adding value in metals fulfillment
University Park ships some orders nationally, but much of its volume is as a regional metals service center that delivers metals to customers on a next-day or sometimes same-day basis. Metal service centers allow companies that use steel or other metals in their products or projects to get materials on a just-in-time basis, reducing their carrying costs, and tapping Ryerson’s expertise on quality materials and inventory management.
Ryerson sources metals from various mills and stores them to meet the demand outlook, using enterprise resource planning (ERP) system software to manage orders, procurement and materials management.
CS&W, founded in 1909 and part of Ryerson since 2018, is known for its inventory range and expertise in helping clients choose the right materials. Now as part of Ryerson, it has increased its inventory range and expertise and added the new site at University Park, which opened and began shipping product in January 2024.
Customer delivery needs set the pace of order filling and staging inside the four walls at University Park, which, in turn, influences replenishment from mills, receiving and putaway activity. It’s very much a pull environment driven by customer needs, explains Giesie.
“In our business, the truck schedule drives everything,” says Giesie.
The nature of this business drove the University Park project, from its siting to the design of the building itself. “We looked at the entire metro area and did an analysis of where our customer base was located, where the mills are located, and traffic patterns in the region to determine which location would be the best for us logistically to offer the best distribution model for our customers,” Giesie says. “We also looked at transferring employees so we could see which locations would be the best bet to retain our employees, and University Park emerged as the win/win location for our model.”
University Park does also ship flat and sheet metal goods, but the long metal products drive specific equipment and layout needs. Flatbed trailers need to pull into and out of the facility for unloading and loading using overhead cranes.
On the receiving side, the cranes unload to stations where the AGVs can pick up and put away goods into storage. Similarly, on the outbound side, the metals for an order are transferred to an order fill station, then transported by a conveyor system for staging where they are lifted with a heavy-duty, dual-hoist crane onto the trailers.
Each metro truck is typically doing multiple deliveries per route, so the outbound staging of orders calls for carefully planned loads and quality control steps to ensure shipment accuracy and proper load sequence.
“Managing those outbound orders involves some critical processes for us,” says Giesie.
The value of the AGVs
The first application for the AGVs was to autonomously store pans of long goods into the narrow aisle cantilever storage. This spring, the operation began using the units in combination with manual lift trucks to feed the order fill stations. Eventually, the goal is to remove the manual lift trucks from this process.
This phased approach immediately reduced the need for lift truck operators, while freeing up skilled operators for other tasks that involve operation of heavy equipment or involve human decision-making skills from workers who know the metals fulfillment process.
“Our philosophy was that we could take good people and put them into different areas, versus putting them in a lift truck and have them manually move the materials,” says Giesie. “We looked at what we could automate with the AGVs, and where we could best use those human skill sets in other areas. We’ve got a lot of other value-added tasks and processing that we do with equipment, which is why here at University Park, we still have 200 employees out there working for our customers every day.”
Rack and AGVs as one
The AGVs do require some human oversight, adds Derek McClenathen, general manager, corporate operations for Ryerson, but they are highly accurate when it comes to sensing and identifying locations and digitally tracking all moves, which helps with inventory accuracy.
“One of the biggest benefits is that you do not lose track of material with this automation,” McClenathen says. “The robot will always know the correct location to put a pan, and we’ll always know where that pan was placed.”
For each shift, an industrial engineer at the site manages the AGVs, configuring new missions and monitoring for any exceptions or development of bottlenecks. The role is a bit like being an “air traffic controller” for the AGV fleet, explains McClenathen, though rather than staring at a screen, the AGV fleet engineer gets alerts and checks on mission and task progress as needed, dealing with any exceptions. For instance, the autonomous units will pause and trigger an alert if they sense signs of instability with a pan of goods being moved, which is a rare occurrence, but one that needs checking before the unit is allowed to proceed.
The AGVs have proven to be reliable in executing their tasks, McClenathen says, but rolling them out as an effective system involves development of standard operating procedures (SOPs) around how to best monitor them and how to prioritize and adjust missions for the fleet, given the requirements coming down from the ERP system.
“There were some learnings involved with the use of this technology,” says McClenathen. “Much of it involves the human interaction with the fleet management system that controls the AGVs, so we had to build some processes and SOPs around that.”
The cantilever rack and AGVs are designed to work as one space-efficient system for storing and handling these long goods, with just enough aisle width to accommodate one AGV (each aisle is 58 inches wide), using a contact point at the base of the racking to help the unit stay perfectly aligned in the aisle for putaway or retrieval tasks.
The way the system is set up, some of the AGVs stay within each aisle to autonomously handle putaway and retrieval, while other AGVs are used to bring pans of materials from receiving to storage, placing them at a transfer rack location located at the end of each aisle.
The site has 18,000 storage locations, able to accommodate 6,000 SKUs. The cantilever racking includes more than 1,000 double-sided columns, more than 30,000 arms, and more than 15,000 linear feet of structural metal for guard rails. There are 32 aisles of this cantilever rack, and within each aisle, multiple vertical storage positions make full use of the 34-foot-high clear height of the building to gain more storage density.
As part of the project, CSi and Steel King modified the racking design with inward notches at the base as a point of reference for AGV alignment, a design change that provides more useable rack space.
Before the site was complete, the AGVs were first tested at a Ryerson facility in Plymouth, Minn., where they performed reliably at putting away long loads into existing cantilever rack. Now at University Park, there is the advantage of all new rack with no imperfections from prior use with manual trucks. While new rack isn’t a prerequisite for using these AGVs, a greenfield project with new rack was seen as an ideal scenario.
“I think it was a perfect time with this greenfield project and this new technology to design the new rack around the specifications of the AGVs, to create a best-case scenario for having the system work as well as possible right from the start,” says Giesie.
Continuous improvement
Next up for the use of the AGVs, Ryerson is working on deeper integration down to the detailed inventory location level between the ERP system and the AGV fleet software to make it easier for the engineer monitoring the AGV fleet to adjust tasks or route priorities and to avoid potential bottlenecks, says McClenathen. For instance, if empty pans are running low at panning stations, the enhanced integration would make it easier for the engineer monitoring the fleet to adjust tasks so that moving empty pans back to those stations becomes an elevated priority.
It only takes one engineer per shift to monitor the fleet of 20 AGVs, with occasional input from the operations supervisor when it comes to mission priorities or exceptions. The autonomous navigation and object-detection sensing in the AGVs is reliable, adds McClenathen, so lessons learned are more around fleet management priorities given the order requirements coming down from ERP.
“One of the things we learned early on is that you have to keep the wheels moving on the overall process—you don’t want humans waiting on the robotic units for anything, so we are making it easier to adjust fleet priorities,” he says.
The installation of the rack was accelerated by flexibility on the part of the builder, so that some of the racking could be installed in phases before the entire building was finished, says Giesie. It also took careful planning to phase in the movement of certain types of materials from the old campus to University Park, and the two sites needed to run in a parallel for a few months before all 50 million pounds of metals inventory was transferred to University Park, and the old site could be shut down, while hitting all customer needs during the transition period.
The deployment of AGVs at this scale at a major metals service center is considered an industry first.
Both Giesie and McClenathan say a phased approach to the AGVs was the right choice, given the complexity of the product being handled, and the mission-critical nature of outbound order filling. Immediately, they saw operator labor savings versus all manual lift truck operations.
“We haven’t realized the full benefits of the AGV fleet yet, but we continue to realize more benefits every day,” says Giesie. “It goes beyond labor efficiency. The benefits are more around having automation that optimizes our routings and our tasks—being better able to look at order patterns and use that to digitally optimize how we are going to pick today, or how are going to put materials away. Now we have a software-driven way of knowing what will be most efficient, rather than trying to have a person figure all that out. There are more benefits to be gained down the road, as we further optimize the flow, but with the new site and by bringing in this automation innovation, we’re now in the best competitive place we can be to serve our customers.”
New facility provides efficiencies in the four walls and regionally
- Central Steel & Wire, a Ryerson subsidiary
- University Park, Ill.
- Size: 900,000 square feet
- Products handled: long bar/tube/pipe/structural and flat sheet metal products
- Shifts: Two shifts, five days a week
- Employees: 200
Central Steel & Wire (CS&W), a subsidiary of Ryerson, is a leading metals distributor and fabricator with service centers in Chicago; Milwaukee; Lansing, Mich.; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Greensboro, N.C. A key improvement in its network was the opening earlier this year of its new 900,000-square-foot facility in the Chicago metro region.
The new metals service center and depot in University Park, Ill., adds internal materials handling efficiencies by putting all activities under one roof (the site it replaces had four buildings), and leverages a fleet of 20 automatic guided vehicles (AGVs), designed to handle long loads within the new site’s very narrow aisle, cantilever style racking. The implementation of the autonomous, long-load handling lift trucks is considered to be a first within the metals center service industry.
To ship the orders, Ryerson has a fleet of flatbed trailer trucks that pull into the facility at University Park to load, and from there, service customers over the widespread metro region. Each metro truck typically makes several stops per day. The new site’s location, on the south edge of the metro region deals with less traffic congestion than the legacy site, improves route scheduling by making it easier for the fleet to get in and out of the facilities and hit more stops in less time.
Ryerson and CS&W looked at various potential sites in the Chicago metro area for the new facility, and chose University Park for a variety of reasons, with traffic patterns and truck routing being a leading consideration.
Also important, however, was a relatively close distance to the former site, which helped CS&W and Ryerson to retain many of the former site’s employees, according to Nicole Giesie, vice president of operations, CS&W.
“The whole process for the siting and design of University Park is something an entire team of people thought long and hard about, focusing on long term growth and success both for Central Steel & Wire and Ryerson,” Giesie says. “I can tell you our truck drivers are thrilled with the new location, as it is easier to get into and out of than the former site.”
By mid-2021, the site was chosen, and construction at University Park began in March 2022, with the building completed in late April 2023. The remainder of 2023 consisted of outfitting the site with equipment and getting the autonomous lift trucks on site and configuring them for use.
The company also had to plan for and phase in the transfer of roughly 50 million tons of metal inventory into the new site. While Ryerson and CS&W offer a full range of metals including flat/sheet products, University Park stores and distributes a high volume of long products such as steel tubing and bars, which are stored in the new, very narrow aisle cantilever racking.
University Park became fully operational in January 2024, with the AGV lift trucks handling tasks such as putting away long product into storage and bringing goods to a transfer point for order filling. Some manual lift trucks are also used at the facility, but the autonomous units bring both labor efficiency to the site, and using the fleet software, a digitized record and view of long product storage and material moves.
System suppliers
- Rack and storage infrastructure: Steel King
- Autonomous lift trucks: Combilift
- Rack installation: Container Systems Inc. (CSi)
- ERP system software: SAP
- Cranes: OMi Cranes
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