The Material Handling Industry group defines material handling as the “movement, protection, storage and control of materials and products throughout manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, consumption, and disposal”.

Automatic Handling: Automatic machinery like fork lifter exists to reduce the number of manual movements. Nevertheless, most automatic machines fall into the category of semi-automatic material handling as they require employees to load and unload goods or to drive the equipment. At present, fully automating these processes is too expensive for most warehouses.

Why Does Warehouse Material Handling Matter?

Material handling directly impacts productivity in warehouses, manufacturing plants, and distribution centers. An inefficient facility causes errors and delays, eroding customer loyalty and making it easier for your competition to snatch away business.

Something else that’s interesting? Effective material handling isn’t only about sorting your goods into unit loads. Successful businesses invest time into monitoring and improving their material handling system in order to protect:

• The integrity of their goods
• The productivity of their retail warehouse,3PL warehouse, distribution center, or manufacturing plant
• The physical and mental health of their workers

When a shipment arrives, a good material handling process ensures goods get from the dock to the appropriate rack in good time. It also accounts for proper control of materials. You can mitigate theft, damage, and spoilage with a material handling process that limits access to certain parts of your warehouse to particular employees.

Finally, proper material handling allows warehouses to store goods in an organized manner that makes it easy to pick and pack inventory for outgoing shipments.

Optimize Accessibility to Increase Worker Speed

Are pallets stored in a way where workers can access goods without moving other goods out of the way?

Are racks safety and readily accessible by forklifts and pallet jacks?

Calculate How Much Inventory You’ll Store

An overloaded facility has a detrimental effect on material handling. Improperly stacked loads can topple causing injuries. Poorly stored goods require workers to move one product to gain access to another.

Understanding how much inventory you’ll store at a given time and how big the average item will be helps you make smart decisions about pallet rack height and aisle space.

The Different Types of Material Handling Equipment

There are different types of material handling equipment. The types of equipment you order, and how you organize them in your warehouse, impact your material handling processes.

• Storage and handling equipment: Stores goods in the time between receiving and shipping. Examples of such equipment are stacking frames, racks, and shelves.

• Engineered systems: Automated units that efficiently move goods through a warehouse and reduce the need for manual intervention. Examples of such equipment are automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), robotic delivery systems, automatic guided vehicles, and conveyor systems.
• Industrial trucks: Powered vehicles that move materials around a warehouse. Examples of such vehicles are forklifts, hand trucks, side loaders, and pallet jacks.
• Bulk Material Handling Equipment: Equipment that assists workers with handling large loads. Examples of such equipment include bucket elevators, stackers, and silos.

Conveyors move materials from Point A to Point B, limiting the amount of heavy lifting required. They also take goods through different stages of the distribution process including receiving, packaging, and shipping.  

Overhead handling methods supplement conveyors. Rather than occupying floor space to move goods, overhead handling methods, such as hoists and cranes, use overhead space to move goods from Point A to Point B. Additionally, they allow warehouse operators to use floor space for storage rather than as maneuvering room for shifting shipments.

Industrial trucks, like forklifts, hand pallets offer more maneuverability around the warehouse, allowing stock pickers to navigate aisles and handle pallets.

Organizing Your Warehouse Intelligently

While automation is incredibly effective, it may not always be the best solution. There are some problems that can’t be solved by simply adding more technology. For instance, an automated system requires pre-defined rules, and if you don’t understand what the most efficient layout of your warehouse is, your gadgets won’t be as efficient. Organizing your warehouse intelligently means keeping it clean, sorting inventory in a sensible system, and putting materials away when they’re not in use.

Growing Importance of Material Handling Systems

Businesses create a place and time utility through the help of material handling. It’s most helpful for retail stores, warehouses, and manufacturing plants. In the job of all production workers, material moving equipment plays a vital role. Operators of these machines use them to conveniently transport items to industrial settings like moving construction goods in building sites.

When it comes to the design, material handling systems have an integral structure to efficiently manage the flow of materials between activities of production systems. If there are two activities adjacent to one another, materials can be simply transported. However, for separated activities, more expensive transport trucks will be needed to move the materials.

Using industrial trucks are expensive because of the labor cost of operators plus the negative effect on the production system’s performance when several units are fused together in one transfer batch just to reduce the required number of moving trips.

Ensuring safety in workplaces where material transportation occurs is also a growing need across most industries. This is due to the ease of accidents that occur in facilities. Efficient material handling processes reduce these accidents. The importance of materials handling can also be simplified as highlighted here:

• To conveniently and safely transport materials across facility floors
• Assist in streamlining work activities and organizing factory space
• Reduce accidents in facilities where heavy materials or loads are transported.