From a total of 39,324 inspections last year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found 88,846 violations. For warehousers, distributors and manufacturers, the list is familiar.
While there are dozens and dozens of shelving manufacturers and even more variations of trade names for them, there are really just three basic kinds of industrial shelving manufactured and broadly used — Rivet-Type, Steel Clip, and Wire. Of course, there are more variations of these shelving types than you can imagine, but most shelving boils down to these kinds. You can also consider bulk rack as “shelving”, but we have found that heavy duty rivet shelving often fulfills the roles it has typically filled.
We recently published the 2008 Cisco-Eagle full-line catalog. It’s 132 pages of equipment, specs, and information about our product and services offerings. You can request one from any Cisco-Eagle sales associate, or contact us directly for one through the website. If you want to download it for instant availability, click here. It’s a large file at 10MB compressed, so it has been broken up into smaller sections - pick the one you want and instantly get it. Of course, more information is always available on this website, but for printing and easy portability, the catalog may be just the thing for you.
Left: Pflow Regional Manager Chuck Cobb .
Right: Cisco-Eagle Houston Market Manager Jason Eitreim
Pflow Industries (pronounced “flow”, by the way) recently recognized Cisco-Eagle as a top distributor of its vertical reciprocating conveyor and other lift products. Pflow Southeast Regional Manager Chuck Cobb presented the awards to our President, Steve Strifler, and to Houston Market Manager Jason Eitreim. (more…)
Above: Hytrol’s Bill Hawthorne presents Cisco-Eagle President Steve Strifler
with a plaque honoring our 2007 conveyor sales achievements
Cisco-Eagle and Hytrol Conveyor Company recently celebrated our partnership at CEI’s Dallas, Texas facility. Hytrol CEO Greg Goodner, Bill Hawthorne, Matt Farris, and Frank Nichols came to Dallas to present a plaque honoring Cisco-Eagle’s placement as one of the company’s top conveyor distribution partners in 2007. Cisco-Eagle typically finishes among Hytrol’s top 3 distributor/integrators, and recently passed $100 million in total purchases from Hytrol.
Since the gathering was a day before Goodner’s birthday, we honored him with a cake and happy birthday serenade.
PHOTOS: Greg Goodner | The Presentation
The National Crime Insurance Bureau estimates that over $1 billion of construction tools and equipment is stolen every year. Of course, if you’ve ever run a construction or renovation site, a large maintenance concern, a tool crib, or other industrial job site where plenty of valuable tools are there for the taking, that won’t surprise you in the slightest.
Everyone from Airline maintenance mechanics to assembly and maintenance techs face the problem. The loss of equipment & tools, the productivity dumps, and the climate of dishonesty they create are all drains on efficiency and profitability for just about every commercial operation. we’ve always said that half the security battle is in the storage methods; security begins with the way things are stored. It cannot be an afterthought…
Cisco-Eagle’s Houston, Texas Field Operations team was recently honored by FedEx for its exceptional level of performance and use of quality management tools.
Our guys are always out there doing things for customers at difficult times, in crunch time, and on time. They make things work and keep them working, so it wasn’t any surprise for customers to be happy with them. Matt Lanclos, Tom Hull,and Art Rodgers from our Houston Field Operations group, and James Lawson, Regional Manager Field Operations for Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, received FedEx Ground’s GCST Region Certificates of Excellence on January 9. There were also certificates for Cisco-Eagle’s Houston and Dallas offices…
We have uploaded the (free!) PDF of our latest paper, “10 Ways to use Material Handling to Increase Security.” It’s a quick, 4-page read with an additional page on identification systems that can help you quickly sort out the nature of what is being conveyed for a higher level of security and efficiency. It’s free, printable, and worth your time. You might ask why a material handling company is concerned with security. I might ask why one wouldn’t be concerned with security. Sure, Cisco-Eagle doesn’t sell cameras or alarm systems. We don’t consult on personnel or security systems, but what we do is inseparable from security, because the way you store and handle valuable items is impossible to separate from the way you secure them…
Wire decking is ubiquitous with selective pallet rack–it’s perhaps the most broadly-specified selective rack accessory. People use it to when they want pallet support with greater structural strength than other materials, when they want to load boxes or other non-palletized load onto racks, when they want to handle loads that aren’t deep enough to sit on uprights, and when they want to eliminate dust and debris inherent with solid decking materials…
Sure, we’ve heard all the talk of lean manufacturing, but what about lean warehousing? I’ve been in facilities that have straightened production lines in pursuit of lean principles, and those lines included storage factors and materials handling, but I’ve never seen it specifically done in a distribution operation. Many warehousing operations have probably applied aspects of lean in the warehousing process, but how many have, from top to bottom, implemented a lean warehousing program?
The original concept of lean was designed for mass production of identical or similar items, so a straight conversion to warehousing, where volumes aren’t massive or standardized, isn’t a given. You can’t apply the science of lean exactly the same way, but you can definitely apply it.
