Material Handling Equipment

Material Handling Equipment: Most Efficient Way to Deal With Heavy Problems

Material handling equipment is any machine, tool, or equipment that is employed in the industrial sector for moving, loading, or storing heavy loads. They are most commonly used in commercial environments and in some industries, without these equipment, the operations will come to a halt. The majority of the material handling equipment is designed to be automatically operated such as forklifts, hydraulic pallet trucks, etc. helping operators to lift and transport tons of materials swiftly and safely.

Industrial Benefits of Working With Material Handling Equipment

Material handling equipment has numerous benefits for fast forwarding internal operations:

Saving Money

Irrespective of the nature of the industry, cutting expenses and saving money is the priority. Although Material handling equipment requires a notable investment, it will prove to be a great money saver in the long term. Employing them in the facility will save you a lot of time and money on internal operations such as loading, unloading, moving, and storing heavy loads.

Further, this equipment will allow you to reduce the number of workforces that you need before moving or transporting heavy loads, saving labor expenses.

Saving Space

Having adequate space is a must in an industrial facility for streamlining production, staff movement and transportation goods, etc. Using storage and material handling equipment a single employee can make a lot of room by moving heavy loads, final products waiting to be moved but are on hold, frequently.

Furthermore, material handling equipment that can lift loads or pallets to certain heights can make the job easier. They can store pallets on shelves at heights, cleaning up the floor space for other operations.

Reducing Damage

Unlike manual loading or moving methods, material handling equipment eliminates the chances of accidental product damage. Assigning the moving tasks of heavy loads to facility staff manually can result in accidental drops or destruction of the product, making the company liable to pay for damages. Here’s when a company should employ material handling equipment, letting a single operator move all loads around the facility. So that others can focus on different essential tasks.

Reliable Customer Service

Saving more time while delivering and shipping the products allows a business to focus more on its customers. Hence, facilitating material handling equipment in your facility will allow your personnel to offer reliable customer services. Moreover, client satisfaction hits when bulk orders are delivered within promised timelines.

Increased Efficiency and Productivity

To overthrow your competitors, it is highly essential for a business to stay competitive. It always requires high efficiency and productivity levels to stay ahead of your market competitors. One way to do it is by streamlining your operations and logistics by facilitating material handling equipment. They are one of the most logical and cost-effective solutions for increasing the productivity levels of your staff by automating operations. Mainly the productivity index blows up the charts when material handling equipment overtakes manual work. Because manual labor work results in high fatigue levels, which decreases productivity.

Increased Safety

Material handling equipment automates the complete labor work. Hence, it eliminates the chances of having injuries and accidents on the facility floor, which earlier happened because of human error. It's not easy to manually move or transport heavy loads weighing up to hundreds of kilos. It makes the facility prone to various types of accidents and even catastrophic events. For instance, in the construction, mining, and manufacturing industries, operations can easily go wrong without the help of material-handling equipment.

Employee Satisfaction

In many places across industries discomfort in jobs caused by manual work demotes the employees to the extent that they have only one option, which is to leave the job. By hiring automatic industrial instruments like material handling equipment, employees get motivated to put effort into their work and show productivity levels.

Four Major Types of Material Handling Equipment

Material handling equipment are classified into four major categories, which are: storage and handling, bulk material, industrial trucks, and automated systems. Let’s discuss about them in detail to help you choose the one right for you:

Storage Material Handling Equipment

These types of material-handling equipment are employed in storage sections and material-handling units. These equipment safely store the materials or goods for a short period that are not being used presently.

These equipment include:

• Pallet Trucks: it is a trolley on wheels that lifts and transports palletized loads.
• Shelves & Drawers: these are utilized to store small to medium-sized materials.
• Mezzanines: these are unique platforms developed using wood, steel, or fiberglass, to be used as additional storage floors.
• Stacking frames: special equipment used to store a large number of pallets or racks.
  

Bulk Material Handling Equipment

Various types of materials in loose form are stored and transported using bulk material handling equipment. Types of loose materials include nuts, bolts, metals, minerals such as rocks and stones, liquids, etc.

These equipment include:

• Conveyor Belts: these are interlinked belts driven by pulleys to transport materials between different stations of the facility.
• Stackers: this equipment is used to load or unload heavy materials with minimum manual work for storage.
• Reclaimers: these are used to separate specific material from stockpiles.
• Bucket elevators: these are employed to lift bulk materials on a large scale.
• Hoppers: specially designed to dump the loose materials in containers or any storing medium.
  

Industrial Truck Equipment

For large-scale moving operations, Industrial trucks of various types are used to automate the complete process. They are highly efficient in loading, unloading, and moving heavy objects within the facility. These industrial trucks are classified based on their object lifting methods for instance some come equipped with a fork, a few with flat surfaces, and some require additional equipment support for lifting.

• Forklifts: these are industrial trucks, equipped with forks, utilized for lifting and moving heavy objects.
• Hand trucks: these unique equipment are pushed by hands, equipped with two wheels and one ledge to carry objects around.
• Pallet Trucks: these are hand-driven material handling equipment, designed to lift and move the palletized loads around the facility.
• Sideloaders: these are specially designed to carry out material handling and lifting in narrow aisles and passageways.
• Order Pickers: these are very unique equipment, using which an operator is lifted to reach the materials stored on high shelves.

Automated Systems

Automated Systems or Engineered Systems, as the name hints, are modern-age automatic equipment streamlining material handling and lifting on a large scale. These are high-powered vehicles that function with a combination of software and robotics.

These equipment include:

• Autonomous Mobile Robots or AMRs: these are advanced robots with flat surfaces working independently to analyze the environment and move objects without any human intervention.
• Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems or AS/RS: most commonly employed in warehouses and large distribution centers to automate the process of moving objects and managing stock. They receive instructions from the computer and once set, they work independently.
• Automated Guided Vehicles or AGVs: these equipment are a combination of software and robotics, but require human operators to navigate through the facility.
  

Applications of Material Handling Equipment across Various Industries

Different industries hire different types of material-handling equipment for various applications. Here are a few major industries that utilize them:

• Construction: The construction industry extensively utilizes material handling equipment, especially forklifts and hand pallet trucks, to move heavy objects like cement bags, drums, etc. around the construction site.
• Distribution Centers: Material handling equipment like stackers and engineered systems like AGVS are employed in distribution centers to move and load final products toward transportation units, either to store or for delivery.
• Warehouses: These equipment are hired in warehouses to load, unlock, or move objects within the facility. For higher productivity levels they mostly use pallet trucks and stackers.
• Manufacturing Plants: Manufacturing plants use both manual and automated material handling equipment on a large scale. They are conveniently utilized to transport heavy loads or machinery from one station to another.
  

How to Choose The Right Material Handling Equipment For Yourself?

These are the important factors to consider before choosing the equipment for yourself:

• Type of Material: identify which type of material you are hiring for such as solids, liquids, or gases.
• Work Space: identify how much work space your facility has to accommodate material handling equipment. For confined spaces, heavy-duty machines cannot be equipped.
• Budget: must choose affordable equipment to use the resources efficiently.
• Cost Effective: companies must hire material handling equipment that offers low operational and maintenance costs.