We’re compiling a great deal of conveyor-related information, tips and articles into a series of downloadable conveyor white papers.  The first focuses on the basics of conveyor maintenance – what to do, when to do it, and how, in general terms. As the paper says, most conveyors ship with detailed maintenance manuals that will help your staff keep them running at top efficiency. The good news is that conveyors are very tough, reliable machinery. They require maintenance, but for the hours of service and stress put on them, they are remarkably reliable.

• Check out the Basic Conveyor Maintenance Checklist (PDF File – opens a new window)
• Cisco-Eagle’s extensive Service and Maintenance area
• Service, Maintenance and Installation Brochure (PDF File -opens a new window)

CEMA, (Conveyor Equipment Manufacturers Association) has released its Application Guide for Unit Handling Conveyors.  This is an in-depth guide for design details and application guidance of Unit Handling Conveyors (these conveyors typically mean pallet handling, but also can encompass cartons, totes, monorail, and manufactured items.  This application guide was collaborated by conveyor industry leaders. Order yours directly from CEMA for $250 plus ship/handling charges of $15.75 per single copy. CEMA may offer discounts of orders of 20+ books.

More on Unit Handling Conveyors:

• Pallet Conveyors
• Case Study: Simmons Pet Foods
• Pallet Handling Conveyor Guide

As part of our goal to provide you with more information and tools about the products we offer, we have added four new online conveyor calculators to the website. These calculators will help you to find the right conveyor for the job.

Let’s take a look at each calculator, and what they can do for you.

• Incline Calculator. This calculator will provide you with dimensions for an incline conveyor. You can answer questions such as “Will an incline conveyor fit in the space I have?”, or “Given a specific angle of incline, how long will the conveyor need to be?” With incline conveyors there are four basic dimensions and the incline angle to consider. If you know three of the dimensions or the angle, the calculator will provide the missing dimensions or angle.
• Box Tumbling Calculator. The taller the carton, container, or box you wish to move on an incline, the more prone it is to tumble. If you enter the dimensions of the product, the calculator will provide the maximum angle of incline before it will tumble back down the conveyor.
• Skewed Roller Calculator. If you need to align a package to the right or left side of the conveyor one method is to skew the rollers by moving one end of the rollers over by one notch in the frame. This calculator will tell you the length the package will need to travel across skewed rollers to move the package the required distance to one side.
• Minimum Curve Width Calculator. As a package is being conveyed through a curve it can become jammed between guardrails if the curve is not wide enough. This calculator will help you find the minimum width required to move that package through the curve without jamming.

There is still more to consider in the proper design of conveyor, and these calculators address some of the issues. Contact us if you need more assistance with a complete design for your requirement.

This is a good visual comparison of how much space is utilized by various storage methods. The vertical carousel provides the same amount of storage space as several rows of shelving or modular drawer storage. In this particular instance, the carousel saves over 1,400 square feet of floor space when compared to shelving. Of course, you know the cost differences are significant, but there are other factors in making a decision about these types of storage equipment.

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Next time you’re standing there wondering where you’re going to put an inbound shipment while your dock is stacked with empty pallets, look at those doors (or at the void above them)  —  the copious space between the top of the doors and the ceiling is unused. Multiply each door by that amount of space, and in many operations, we’re talking serious amounts of unused square footage.

The easy solution: find a use for it with over-dock-door storage. You can’t really rack heavy stuff up there without some significant structure. The best thing to consider is empty pallets, which take up a ton of room and are relatively lightweight. And usually, they’re all over the floor and always in your way. Empty pallets clutter up the shipping & receiving docks or can take up positions in your racks that would be better suited to full pallets of finished goods or incoming shipments.

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Over the last few months, we have been tweaking the conveyors offered on our website to offer a variety of options in a usable, easy-to-understand format. What we came up with is an online configuration system that allows great flexibility in changing the conveyor the way you want to change it.

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Although most metal markets are still depressed from their all time highs of the last few years, it’s quite likely that steel pricing is going to increase in the near term. What’s that mean? It means that pricing for steel goods like warehouse racks, conveyors, shelving, mezzanines, and other material handling equipment will be on the rise.

“We are clearly going to see higher prices for May,” said Marty Forman, president of Forman Metal Co.  in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Things aren’t going to explode, by any means, but the scuttlebutt is that steel prices are going up $15 to $20 a ton.”

The takeaway? Prices are as low as they will be for the near future right now.

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With the advent of widespread e-commerce fulfillment, just-in-time principles, lean management, supply chain collaboration, globalization, the need for ever-faster response, and constant pressure to reduce expenses through headcount and shift reductions, today’s warehouse manager is being asked to do more than ever before.

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There isn’t enough room at your average industrial workstation. In fact, many order pickers, packers, shippers, and other professionals might tell you that you could have a 10′ long workbench, and they’d still be squeezed for space. In a busy operation, it’s a constant battle between availability of materials and space for doing the actual work. So what’s the solution? A larger workbench top? According to Packmaterials.com (registration required, but a pretty useful resource from Dehnco – we have reprinted the entire piece here, with permission), if there is not enough workstation storage area a bigger table won’t help – and may hurt.

The tabletop surface should not be considered storage space in the first place. So that leaves the unanswered question: how do you get more storage space for needed materials?

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Cisco-Eagle CEO Warren Gandall discusses ways to do more with less in a struggling economy

Achieving more with less is a core goal of most businesses. In the warehousing and industrial world, that means building more, shipping more, doing more – controlling more – with fewer resources. The typical issue is labor in many of these operations. It takes people to run a shipping operation, and plenty of them.

“In economically challenging times like now, you’re being asked to produce more per person than ever,” said Cisco-Eagle’s CEO, Warren Gandall. “You’ve probably had to let people go. You may have shut down some areas, cancel contracts, cut a shift, and take the steps necessary to emerge from this downturn. But the big question is, how do you emerge stronger?”

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