The Material Handling Blog

Battery-powered counterbalance trucks are really nothing new for internal operations – they’ve been the standard choice for decades, due to their quietness and lack of emissions.
However, many companies that use counterbalances outside, in yards or uncovered loading and unloading areas, still choose diesel or LPG trucks due to their fast refuelling and ability to cope with the elements.

Due to demands from the market and improvements in technology, it’s now feasible to electrify your entire counterbalance fleet, even for those trucks that work outside. It could even bring a number of benefits.

Order picking is a demanding process, and with the continuing rise of eCommerce, it's becoming a bigger and bigger part of the logistics chain. 

Compared to other materials handling processes, it's also very expensive. To illustrate this, we can look at the costs of handling goods in different parts of the materials handling process. If we estimate that the cost of unloading 1000kg of goods from a transport is around €1 to €2, and the cost of placing the same quantity of goods into storage is around €3 to €5, then the cost of picking 1000kg of goods can range from €30 to €100, simply due to the amount of labour involved. That's why if you want to reduce your operation's costs and boost efficiency, focusing on improving your order picking is a smart solution.

Sometimes, only the smallest change is needed to make a big difference to your materials handling operation — especially when it affects such a time-consuming operation as order picking (which is also the most expensive process in the handling chain).

For order pickers who spend their working days walking along aisles, removing items from the racking and placing them onto pallets on their trucks, an additional feature as minor as rising forks could have huge benefits — both to their health, and also to their efficiency and productivity.

Lithium-ion, or Li-ION batteries are everywhere these days — in your smartphone, in your laptop, possibly even on your bicycle or in your car. However, they're probably not in the forklift trucks your company uses for materials handling.

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.

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.

Operating a forklift is a demanding job, and the stresses of a busy materials handling operation can put strain on drivers. This doesn't only make them uncomfortable and prone to injury, but also makes them less efficient and productive, harming the operation's bottom line.

Fortunately, the physical challenges of logistics work can be made much easier with the help of ergonomic design — not only does it make the job much safer and more comfortable for drivers, but also increases overall productivity. Let's take a look at the main causes of strain and injury in the warehouse, and how they can be mitigated with ergonomics.

Making the most efficient use of the available floor space in your warehouse is always important. However, when the density of storage increases, placing and removing unit loads when you need to typically takes more time.

There’s a number of storage options available that offer high density, but they vary in how easily the pallets can be accessed - depending on your operation and individual needs, the best option will be different. With the help of the Materials Handling Guide, we can look at a few options.

Loading and unloading goods as they come into the warehouse can be one of the more expensive and potentially problematic processes in the materials handling process.

To make life more difficult, a range of different trucks can be used at this stage - pallet trucks, stackers and counterbalances all have their benefits and drawbacks in different situations.