October, 2004

Hot Ideas in Material Handling

What's so great about staging carts? All they do is save time, effort--and money.

By Tom Fife

If I told you that a new piece of equipment could reduce the number of times a product is handled, the number of people who handle the product, and injuries to those people, would you be interested? Would you pay me for it?

You don’t have to pay me. Which is just as well, because I’m talking about the humble cart.

Are you rolling your eyes? Most people in our industry think that using carts to move products is simple common sense.

However, since sense is anything but a common commodity, let’s look at how carts can reduce your operating costs and increase your bottom line profit.

Effective cart use is like any "trick of the trade”; it’s often overlooked or underutilized as we rush to meet deadlines.

A new trick to some will be old hat to others, but here are a few ideas to consider:

In your door shop, use a cart to bring components (jamb sides with stops applied, heads, and casing) closer to the building table. Any method that allows you to place more components closer to the door assembly area or to take more components directly off your sub-assembly tables to be placed on carts will boost your productivity.

Using carts for casing allows you to run more casing without stopping and to bring more pre-run casing to the building area. Carts can be used when pre-pulling door jobs that are staged to be run. How about a cart for completed doors? This cuts down on the number of times each door is handled.

Some companies cart the doors by jobs, using the carts as movable storage until the job is loaded. They then roll the cart to the truck.

A few companies have even figured out how to load the cart directly onto the truck, meaning the doors are handled only twice.

What about the interior trim package that goes along with each door order? You’re not still picking your orders one at a time and staging them individually before loading them, are you? With properly designed carts, you can pull many orders at the same time and place them on the carts to be rolled to the truck for delivery.

Instead of sliding or carrying windows to and from the set-up table—or using two or more workers to shuffle product around—place the entire window order on carts, which can easily be rolled to the staging area and to the truck.

What about those screens that seem to have minds of their own? Cart them by order and stage them with the windows to avoid the dreaded "I saw them around here somewhere” syndrome.

Using carts (or hoppers, if you will) for trash can drastically affect your operating costs. Build your own trash hoppers out of wood, and stop paying a trash company to empty your trash from their hoppers. Rental fees ($75 to $150 a month for one hopper) go directly to the bottom line when you build and use your own hoppers.

To get the most out of your carts, get your yard workers involved to determine how they should be built and how to use them. Encourage creativity in design as well as use; specially designed carts can improve efficiency in all areas of operations. Using scrap or dunnage materials to build the carts can increase your savings.

Increased efficiency and savings are great, but let’s not forget the health benefits of using carts. With insurance and health-care costs soaring, is it any wonder many dealers are using their heads instead of people’s backs when it comes to staging and loading materials? Time and touches mean money, but so do sore backs and other injuries.

Carts may seem like simple pieces of equipment, but there is a learning curve that goes along with their use.

Here are a few tips:

• Use a sturdy fastening system: In wood carts, screws or bolts are generally better than nails.
• Guiding the cart can be troublesome, so the proper wheels (big and with locks) are a necessity.
• Reinforcement is an important element: wear and tear can quickly break down a cart.
• Space is sometimes a concern when staging pre-built orders on carts. Remember that vertical space in a warehouse is often overlooked.

Carts are so common that they often go unnoticed, but take my word for it: If you use carts properly, you’ll notice the increased efficiency, reduced operating costs, and healthier workers. And since your customers are the ultimate beneficiaries of these improvements, they just might notice them too.