Allit AG Kunststofftechnik

A brief detour into the world of abbrevia- tions: the SLO business segment. Sometimes a single customer becomes an entire business segment. This happened in the 1970s, when we were commissioned to manufacture multi-use delivery and storage containers for pharmaceuticals wholesalers. Working together with our customer we ex- panded our range of plastic order-picking con- tainers, a relative novelty in those days, into what we called Systemelementen für die Lager- und Materialflussorganisation (System elements for storage and material flow organisation), or SLO for short, and this became the name of a new business segment. Today we are internationally active in this intralogistics sector, producing up to one million containers a year, and in Europe we are the market leaders in the field. One noteworthy feature of our containers is the special addressing, coding and closure system fittings, as well as the option of dimensions other than those specified by European standards (naturally as an exception). What is required of SLO products is reliability and precision hand- ling. If the perfect dimensions for a container are smaller than those of the standard size for pallets, but these containers roll in a smaller radius on conveyor belts as well as being able to surmount rises and drops, then operational safety is paramount and the pallet will have to take the back seat. And we may also note in passing that the product in question is a container for medicines, and medicines are delivered to chemists not on pallets but in vans. Accordingly, an ingenious system to make the containers easily stackable was the only logical and humane solution. Sorry, pallet, but that’s just the way it is! Running speeds, angular measure- ments, tilt behaviour in the event of horizontal or vertical changes on conveyor belts: we think of all these things so you don’t have to.