With its genesis in 2000, the Fastems Flexible Pallet Container, as it is called in full, began with a prototype that was built into an actual shipping container in Fastems’ Tampere, Finland, factory.
Says Bruno Iso-Kivijärvi, one of the original members of the container development team with a career spanning over 40 years: “The prototype made from the shipping container looked really terrible, as we had to, for example, make openings in it with an angle grinder for the loading station. We gave up the actual shipping container and angle grinding, and replaced them with our own frame, but the idea of an FMS in the size of a container remained.” Bruno Iso-Kivijärvi retired at the same time as the 500th container was manufactured, in October.
In the main video, Fastems vice president Harri Lehtinen gives a speech during the celebration of the 500th flexible pallet container (subtitles in English). The stacker crane brings the cake to the table in 1 min 25 s.
The original Fastems system idea was good, however, and the first functioning Fastems FPC was introduced at the biennial EMO trade show in Hanover in autumn 2001, just one year after the idea was realised.
In the beginning, Fastems FPC was developed by a team of two designers and two assemblers. Currently, the product has its own organisation at Fastems’ Tampere factory, and in its best years up to 100 Fastems FPCs were manufactured and shipped around the world.
Fastems FPCs have been delivered to many continents – everywhere from Japan to Africa. They have been connected to machine tools of various brands, with its fast set-up meaning that it can be ready for production at a client’s works within two days.
Currently there are five different models of Fastems FPC. In 15 years, Fastems FPC has evolved from its meagre shipping container beginnings to an elegant production automation product. The biggest advancement, however, has been on the software side. Fastems FPC makes use of Fastems’ MMS5 software, which supports modern ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) cloud services, MTConnect (a US open communications interface protocol) and other possibilities.
MMS5’s production-order-based approach provides an effective way to manage changes in production and orders. The software interface is browser-based and HTML5-based, which makes it terminal-independent and easy to set up.
