Material Handling Significance in Production

Materials are the backbone of any production line. Whatever production and factory you may have, they need raw or processed materials as input. Products don't get made from thin air, and how you treat them is how your end product will look. Quality control and assurance exist for a good reason. From reducing damages and increasing your revenue, material handling rules must be adhered to. Some key figures in material handling are always worth highlighting because industry standards come from tried and tested methods.

1. Warehouse storage and protection

While the material is under your roof, and before it gets made into products, it requires self-storing capacities. What type of material you use dictates the storage type you'll need. For example, liquid material requires canisters, barrels and large tanks, fully sealed and secured. Inspections for leaks and pressure checks should be daily, because when you store liquid, a single error can cause a total loss of liquid material. The same principles apply to gas materials used in production. Hazardous chemicals need clear labels, ventilation and trained personnel to handle them. This leads us to our next topic.

2. Transportation

Transportation of material is a broad subject because it covers plenty of ground and types. First, your material needs transportation to your factory. This is called outside transportation and delivery. Once inside, from storage to transportation between production units, your inside transportation takes over. Moving on to the next granular look, when your material comes to the production lines, it still needs to be moving.

Conveyor belts, belt rollers, impact rollers, weight rollers, and others, are all needed to keep the production flowing. Organising and maintaining a steady outflow of material is possible with recommended and experienced Belle Banne Conveyor Products, supplementing your transportation needs. While your material is standing still, so is your production. Keeping the wheels of production turning is how material converts to profit.

3. Standardised measures

Standardizing your material requirements is how you save yourself from headaches in production. Even a uniform type of material, let's say iron as an example, comes in incredibly diverse shapes, sizes and compounds. Your machines, production lines, and the entire system are built one way, and how your materials enter the production queue is where standardisation comes into play.

Standardising the material requirements leads to establishing quality control. Standardised units, shapes, weight, composition, and other properties of materials, lead to your end products being uniform. Your products can, after all, be only as good as the materials they come from.

4. Safety

We've covered the topic of keeping your material safe, but the people involved are also crucial to the process of material handling. When working at any stage of material handling, we can view the steps as being automated and manual. Automation is perfect for dangerous, hard, and demanding work, but it's very expensive and involves sophisticated technology and maintenance. Manual labour has none of those downsides but requires caution, ethics and consideration for workers. Providing safety training, proper equipment and adhering to ergonomics, keeps your workers motivated to handle material properly and ensures losses associated are at a minimum.

5. Care for the environment

Going forward with your production and materials means going green! Safety hazards, loss of material and production halts are tied to old and backward ways of material handling. Since most of the materials in your production come from nature, it's only natural to apply ecological and eco-friendly material handling laws.

Using the material properties to your advantage, and respecting its limitations and potential dangers, lets you handle it properly. Materials come in many shapes and forms, with different attributes, but they all come from nature, and their properties are known. Environmentally friendly ways of doing sustainable materials management create a productive work atmosphere, practice healthy work ethics and help maintain a sustainable workflow.

6. Production space

Your production space dictates how you can work with material handling. When you have ample space to work with, in multiple warehouses made for each step of the process and plenty of vehicles, it can seem easier to work. But in reality, material handling dictates that material should move as little as possible, it should always move in a straight line with as few obstructions in production as possible.

Automation should be combined with manual labour, and large quantities of material should move at all times while respecting load limits. Organising your material handling within a single, tight and organised warehouse, keeps your control at a maximum and ensures you always have a tight grasp on the situation.

Material handling is not a new science, but its important lessons get ignored for short-term benefits. Viewing your short and quarterly profit margins will ensure your future material losses pile up, leading to costly production halts and losses. This all leads to the conclusion that cutting costs in material handling is never worth or justifiable. The significance of material handling lies in prioritising quality and safety over all else.

Mike is an Australian business consulting specialist. He’s working with companies that outsource their IT maintenance. He often writes about technology, business and marketing and is a regular contributor on several sites.