Dock boards and dock plates are built to transition forklifts, pallet jacks, carts, people and other transportation methods between trailers and your warehouse dock area or staging floor. How can you be sure the transition between truck trailers and your dock is safe?

Read the rest of this entry »

A loading dock is kind of like a football center: It touches the ball every play, but gets no glory when things go well.

Almost all warehouses and manufacturing facilities induct and ship out almost everything through the dock area.  Your shipping and receiving areas are the conduit between your operation and the world beyond. Finding ways to improve operations in the dock area can yield positive results for almost any business. Whether your operation processes 10 pallets or 10,000 packages a day, you can improve the entire operation by optimizing dock operations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yard ramps usually perform one of two functions: (1) They allow forklifts or other equipment to load a truck trailer from the ground, or (2) they allow loading and unloading from the ground level to a dock. For many operations, where truck access to dock doors is impossible or impractical, yard ramps create flexibility. Loads can be deposited at the ground level, and left there until they can be dealt with. Loads can be staged outside the dock area and then picked up by truck later, using the yard ramp. Yard ramps are excellent for many loading/unloading issues.

Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere in your facility, there may be a place where someone frequently shouts “shut the door!”

Perhaps you have operations that require maintaining temperatures within certain limits. There may also be areas heavy-traffic areas where a conventional overhead door’s slow lift and close rates cause delays, slower throughput and cause reduced productivity from waiting on a door to open.

These are situations where a high-speed door may solve a variety of problems. From limiting airborne debris, dust and contaminant infiltration to temperature regulation, high-speed doors pick up the pace in your facility even as they limit the amount of exposure to negative environmental influences. They open and close so quickly that forklifts and people hardly need wait on the door in order to pass through the doorway. Let’s take a few minutes to explore the types and key features of high-speed doors.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sortation systems in distribution is application driven – typically we are talking about order fulfillment (retail, wave pre-sorting, inbound putaway sorts), shipping (end of line carrier sortation, ship to stores), and returns. Traditional sweep sorters, cross-belt, narrow slat & shoe, or belt sorters are often thought of as “for the big guys” in large operations. SpanTech’s new TranSorter is  different, and it’s rolling out at Modex 2012. A sneak peek video below:

The TranSorter is built for hard to sort items, such as fragile items that require different handling. It’s good for ultra-lightweight items, poly bags, etc.  It’s scalable, flexible, and affordable due to truly modular design, a world of layout possibilities, and competitive pricing. It can also deploy quickly, with 6-8 week delivery times and a couple days installation time. If you’re planning to attend Modex, check it out.

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?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Operations & Fulfillment (an excellent publication you should be reading if you aren’t already) has published a list of the top locations for warehouses and DC’s in 2009, in this article “Where to Warehouse: The Top 10 for 2009.”

The winner this year was Henderson, Kentucky, assuming a single warehouse. Dallas, Texas finished among the best locations in a 5-warehouse network.

Read the rest of this entry »

Warehousing is tough. Manufacturing is tough. Order fulfillment is tougher; the longer the operation runs the more difficult it can get.

You deal with constant disruptions , and the system you carefully designed a few years ago may not be working as well today, after changes in your business climate, personnel changes, SKU alterations, new lines, changing storage requirements, corporate policy changes, or issues with key suppliers or customers. These things happen, and at some point, all or most of them will occur in every operation. If a series of small changes have added up to big headaches, what can you do?

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the fourth in a series of briefs on cross docking

A recent project for a large retailer in the Southwest provided a good example of how an element of cross-docking might be deployed to reduce the footprint of distribution space required, reduce order fulfillment touchpoints, and shorten the logical pathway for fulfilling orders.

Incoming shipments are anticipated through the use of advanced shipping notices (ASN’s). Stretch-wrapped pallet loads arrive via truck throughout the day. They arrive at doors designated for cross-docking. These doors were selected based upon proximity to the material handling system which takes advantage of the facility layout. Pallets are unloaded by fork truck, the stretch wrap removed, and cases manually inducted into one of several conveyor staging lanes. Each lane represents a “wave” of orders which will be processed either that day, or a specific day later in the week. When a wave is released, it moves downstream, and the individual cases are sorted to a specific shipping lane whose products are destined for a particular store. Other products from static storage positions and non-conveyables destined for the same store are consolidated at this point. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the third in a series of articles on cross docking

If you started from scratch, many might simply build a cross dock facility with a much shallower depth than most warehouses. A depth of a hundred feet or so, with incoming product on one side that can be easily moved a short distance and loaded on the other side to an outbound truck. Most of us however, must deal with an existing facility, many times a large square box which is not generally the preferred layout. However, as long as the existing facility has a sufficient quantity of dock doors, yard space, and an adequate footprint, you may be fine.

Read the rest of this entry »