Expensive Is Not Always Best
By Priya Jestin, Staff Writer
Boys just love their mean machine toys, and nowhere is this love more apparent than in the material handling industry. Most of the people involved in the material handling and warehousing industry just love to show off the latest sophisticated material handling hardware. But these shiny huge toys need to justify their purchase on hard economic and operational improvement grounds.
It doesn’t help to buy the latest equipment in material handling only to discover that it doesn’t suit your requirements. So, before you even think of buying any new equipment systems, you must assemble all data pertinent to the performance requirements to be met. For this, you must get information on peak, average and seasonal requirements for both throughput and inventory, order characteristics information in terms of number of orders, lines per order and pieces per line and a few other factors.
Now you need to examine various alternative methods of accommodating these requirements must be developed. For instance you could check out the low-tech method, which requires the use of more manpower but has lower capital expenditure. Or you could try a mechanized method, which reduces the manpower input significantly but stops short of full automation. And if full automation is the best solution, you could even try that out. There are many other areas that you need to examine before you make your final decision. Let’s discuss them next time.
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