When it comes to making efficient use of space in your warehouse, mobile racking is one of the leading options. With this storage system, the racking itself stands on motor-driven wheels which move in rails built into the floor.
Proper forklift training can achieve things that every warehouse manager wants – increased safety, better employee satisfaction and retention, and heightened productivity, amongst many other things. However, good training comes at a price, and involves taking time out of the working day, so there’s often people in an organization who refuse to prioritise it.
When planning a new warehouse, there's a huge amount of different factors that have to be considered - the type of items being stored, the available floor space and height in the building itself, and the correct storage system that will both maximise the use of the space available but also make it easy to access pallets.
All trucks require maintenance sometimes, especially in high-intensity materials handling operations. The important thing is how quickly you can get the truck back in operation afterwards. This is where your service supplier's first visit fix rate becomes important.
With proper service and maintenance, a high-quality forklift truck can put in years of service, even in a busy materials handling operation. And depending on the unique requirements of your operation, an older used machine could potentially do the job just as well as a brand new truck.
However, it can sometimes make sense to upgrade to a newer model. Manufacturers release new trucks and upgraded versions of existing models on a regular basis, and the improvements in these updated models could potentially make a big difference to your operation.
Across Europe, the United Kingdom's approaching exit from the European Union is a major talking point among logistics professionals. The full impact of the change is still not known, and it's causing concern on both sides of the English Channel.
Some British firms, such as food distributors and manufacturers are worried about the problems that possible disruption to imports could cause in their well-managed supply chains. And groups in the rest of Europe that deal with logistics between the UK and EU are equally concerned about potential delays to their goods on the way into Britain.
When the time to purchase new forklifts comes, the focus is always on costs. This makes sense — no-one in business would want to spend money unneccessarily, and if a machine can do the job, then the lower the cost, the better.
Costs will always be an important factor. But which ones? When thinking about the money you're going to spend on your forklift over its lifetime, you'll only make the best decision if you consider your hard and soft costs.
So, it's finally here - on 1st January, IFRS 16 Leases came into effect in Europe and beyond. However, in the materials handling industry, where forklift leasing is common, there's still some uncertainty about what the new regulations mean, and how financial reporting will change.
An operation like loading and unloading goods can be made much more efficient in various ways, like by using loading bays, or stand-on pallet trucks instead of pedestrian versions. Order picking, a repetive and expensive logistics process, offers even more possibilities for optimisation. But for the third main part of materials handling - the intake and retrieval of entire unit loads within the warehouse - what can you do increase efficiency and productivity?
Everyone could easily lift a package weighing a few kilograms, but what if you had to pick that same package hundreds of times a day, over the course of weeks and months, possibly from hard-to-reach places? You’d probably start feeling the strain quite quickly, and you’d end up hoping you had some equipment or solution to make the job easier.
This is what order pickers do, but unfortunately the strain and injury that can occur in this job over long periods is still not as well-known as it could be.
