Solutions Spotlight

By Christian Dow For high-end grocery chains seeking to provide a premium customer experience, it’s always a bad thing when customers are outnumbered in the aisles by fast-moving order pickers who often outcompete them for the same product inventory. Whether those order pickers are representing third parties such as Instacart or Shipt or are store employees hired during the pandemic ...

At their essence, electrification and machine controlling devices are about safety in industrial handling. Solutions in the field serve to make the workplace safer in every major manufacturing and distribution sector. Today, the central safety question the field faces is how to properly introduce increasingly sophisticated technological tools and to ensure they are aligned with each other in the operation ...

Across the country, third-party logistics companies are on the lookout for innovative storage and retrieval systems. Whether it’s for use in a cold storage facility or ambient application, there are a number of solutions offered to meet the handling demands of manufacturers, distribution centers and others along the supply and demand chain. There is even an MHI Industry Group that ...

How can companies ensure that an overhead hoist is designed for optimum performance? It starts with determining the right Hoist Duty Service Classification based on the hoist’s ability to operate properly under varying loading conditions and operating cycles, said Bob Burkey, senior engineering advisor at MHI member Columbus Mckinnon Corp. and a member of the Hoist Manufacturers Institute (HMI). “By ...

The need for social distancing inside warehouses and distribution centers to prevent COVID-19 exposure is expected to persist until after widespread vaccination. Robotics can help. Using robotic systems for heavy or repetitive manual labor, especially in small enclosed spaces, means workers are farther apart and fewer workers are needed in these tight spaces, said Volker Schmitz, Ph.D., president and CEO ...

If manufacturers or other enterprises need to install monorails with curves and switches to move materials and products within their facilities in multiple directions, the member companies of the Monorail Manufacturers Association are the ones to turn to. “Many companies use straight monorails, and they work great when you only need to move products in a straight line from point ...

The Protective Guarding Manufacturers Association (ProGMA) member companies have been busy. The leaders from across the industry have been regularly reviewing and discussing the latest technology and its impact on their day-to-day operations. With this in mind, ProGMA recently announced the launch of Protective Guarding Search Tool, which will streamline the protective guarding purchaser’s buying process when it comes to ...

Staffing warehouses and distribution centers has been an especially difficult task in recent years, with historically low unemployment rates and growing wages fueling stiff competition for talented workers. Now, with COVID-19 and social distancing added to the mix, that task has become more challenging and complex than ever before, forcing many companies to embrace emerging technologies sooner than they had ...

BY CHRISTIAN DOW, MHI EXECUTIVE VP OF MEMBERSHIP AND INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP It’s not flashy like the version pioneered by coach Phil Jackson and the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, but the material handling industry has its own take on the triangle offense, and in a fully optimized warehouse, it can be just as impressive to watch. When software and control ...

CREDIT: BLUE GIANT EQUIPMENT CORP. MHI’s Loading Dock Equipment Manufacturers (LODEM) Industry Group helps protect workers from potential hazards that could cause severe injuries and even deaths. Loading dock safety took “a completely different turn” in 1980 with the advent of the vehicle restraint industry and, now, all of the major manufactures in the LODEM group offer vehicle restraints, said ...