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Long gone are the days when you must head to the store with a shopping list in tow. Today, e-commerce surrounds nearly every aspect of our purchases – from clothing to furniture to even groceries – making the hustle and bustle of our daily lives a bit easier. While having the world at our fingertips may be a consumer’s dream, it’s creating an ever-intensifying headache for warehouse and manufacturing facilities with increased resource demands and labor shortages. In order to meet these challenges, facilities need to become forward-thinking and optimize operations. Those that don’t will continue to fall behind or risk becoming obsolete. In the past, manufacturers often turned to expanding the facility footprint to meet increasing resource demands. Doing so, however, brought additional operation costs as well as new labor requirements. Reimagining workflows with innovative process systems will help facilities realize the full potential of already available resources and employee labor. This can be done by improving productivity and capacity, without sacrificing cost efficiency. And it all starts with the right material handling equipment. Give vehicles the work they were made for According to an analysis by CBInsights that measured overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), the average warehouse operates at just 60 percent of its theoretical capacity, and even the most cutting-edge facilities only reach 85 percent efficiency. While production lines and warehouse operations are only as efficient as their employees and vehicles, employees and vehicles can only be as efficient as their environment enables them to be. Adapting material movement processes is one of the simplest approaches to improving facility performance, time and cost savings. Currently facilities rely heavily on forklifts for both vertical and horizontal material movement, but development of new vehicles such as tow tractors and tug systems offer new alternatives with greater ROI potential. While […]