Walk any warehouse, manufacturing facility, or commercial storage operation and you’ll almost always find two things: forklifts and dock doors.
If that building has been in place for any length of time, you’ll also find dinged, dented, ruined or replaced dock door guides, pallet rack frames, building columns, etc. While many operations take steps to use guard rails or bollards to shield their critical machinery, dock doors can be left out.
Posted in Safety & Ergonomics|
The Material Handling Industry of America has posted a video that may be helpful if you are starting the process of “greening” your supply chain.
Baby steps are important, especially at the plant level. For instance, in a recent Cisco-Eagle white paper (PDF), we point out the value of energy efficient conveyor motors. A thousand feet of conveyor outfitted with energy efficient motors could cut enough energy costs over five years to pay for 90% of the cost of the equipment. Also, besides its money savings and “green” profile, you are also saving on heat, which means the equipment may require less maintenance, and endure less wear and tear. It’s a win-win.
Tags: Sustainability
Posted in Warehousing & Distribution|
Storage systems are designed for different goals, but space efficiency is always important for growing and evolving warehouses and manufacturing facilities. Which storage equipment suits you, your application, product and needs?
Above: a visual comparison of space utilization featuring various methods. The vertical carousel provides the same amount of storage space as several rows of shelving or modular drawer storage. In this instance, the carousel saves over 1,400 square feet of floor space compared to shelving. Flow racks also compare favorably to shelving in terms of space utilization.
Tags: warehouse storage, space savings
Posted in Space Optimization & Planning|
The everyday stuff that hits many shipping docks may not be as organized, or to such a scale, but any operation that stores, ships or receives valuable items is at risk of being hit – or is already being hit to some degree. In the above case, an organized group of thieves working at a shipping dock would simply wait until after a supervisor finished checking outbound shipments and add more to them. Since the shipments sat on the docks for 90 minutes, it gave the pilferers plenty of time to work on this. They would place extra cases onto staged pallets and those would ship out on trucks driven by colluding drivers. The next day, the drivers would sell the extra product for cash and split the proceeds with their warehouse accomplices.
Tags: security, Industrial Security, inventory control
Posted in Security|
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)Â —Â 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.
Tags: dock doors, pallets, warehousing, Material Handling, Pallet Rack, space savings, industrial safety
Posted in Space Optimization & Planning|
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?”
Tags: labor costs, Material Handling, lean manufacturing, supply chain operations, warehouse productivity
Posted in Material Handling|
Gravity skate wheel conveyor is probably the most economical conveyor option around for quick, portable movement of lightweight boxes, totes, or trays.
You see it used in shipping & receiving areas, in assembly operations, or as a transitional piece between workstations and powered conveyor lines. You can even slap casters on it for a conveyor that can be rolled in & out of use areas. We even plug it into gravity flow racks to create heavier-duty, FIFO flow storage.
For such a simple piece of conveying equipment — in fact the simplest — errors can and do crop up when it’s ordered incorrectly.
Tags: Conveyor, warehousing, Material Handling, Hytrol
Posted in Conveyor Optimization|
When your load is case-picked, relatively light, and smooth, column flow racks allow you to create storage density and increase the number of pick faces.
Tags: warehousing, Material Handling, distribution center, Carton flow rack, gravity flow systems, Order Picking & Fulfillment
Posted in Order Picking & Fulfillment|
We’ve created an informative article you should check out if you are thinking of installing a mezzanine in your facility.
When implementing an Industrial Equipment Platform (mezzanine) be sure that you are not putting too much stress or weight on the floor of the building. Too much weight will cause the floor to crack – or worse. This article tells you how to calculate the correct load capacity and column spacing for any new structural mezzanine project. Floor capacity depends on the thickness of the concrete, but that’s not the end of the story. It also matters how much the soil underneath the slab will compress.
Click “Calculating Mezzanine Floor Capacities” to get the whole story…
Tags: productivity, work platforms, warehousing, Material Handling, order fulfillment, Mezzanines, industrial storage
Posted in Mezzanines & Industrial Platforms|
Since overloading is a common source of pallet rack collapses, (in fact misapplication, including capacity issues, is the top cause) it’s important to understand how much weight your rack – not just your beams – can bear.
Tags: Material Handling, Pallet Rack, rack capacity, safe rack loading
Posted in Pallet & Warehouse Racks|
