The Material Handling Blog

Creating an effective materials handling operation is hard, and it's even harder if you have to deal with different supplier for your forklift trucks, fleet management solution, service and rental. Even with smaller fleets, juggling different suppliers can be tricky, and it means you have less time to deal with the most important thing — your operation.

That's why choosing a supplier that can offer all of these services at the same time is a good choice. Regardless of your materials handling issue, you have one point of contact at one company — not a network of suppliers who have to get involved.

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.

When planning a new warehouse, or thinking about making changes to an existing one, it's possible to use some basic figures about the operation to make an analysis of how effective the solution will be.

Figures like the trucks' speed, the rack heights in the warehouse and rough travel distances can give you an estimation of how the operation will look. However, this result will only ever be a fairly approximate estimation - and there's a good chance it could be missing crucial details that lead you to the wrong conclusions.

Most people in this industry will have heard of the 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle, as it's sometimes known. It's a basic theory that claims that around 20 per cent of any process is responsible for 80 per cent of the results of that process.

In manufacturing, for example, it is said that around 20 per cent of the defects in a product are responsible for around 80 per cent of the problems. The rule can apply to sales as well — in this case, 80 per cent of sales often come from 20 per cent of customers.