Biggest bang for the buck – replacing, refurbishing, or retrofitting your conveyor system? Unlike fine wine, conveyor systems do not usually get better with age and with 77% of the respondents in a recent MH&L magazine poll indicating their systems are five-plus years old it might time to evaluate.
If your facility has five and ten year plus old conveyor equipment, it might be time to look at your system and see how to make sure the system matches your business objectives and required performance levels and budget. Often SKU proliferation, change in order profiles, physical inventory changes, promotional events change and alter the logic, processes, and procedures developed when the system was planned and implemented.
By doing an analysis, an integrator like ISD can tell if a tune-up is required. Whether its updating controls, improving processes, changing the layout, retrofitting components or replacing portions of the conveyor with new or reconditioned-used to assure performance and uptime a little bit of time and money now can save an organization anywhere from tens of thousands to literally millions of dollars.
Imagine if your system were to fail during your busiest periods? Some organizations do up to 85% of their business within a six to 12 week period of time. A slow down or failure could be catastrophic.
More likely, your current conveyor system merely needs to have a proper maintenance check or some simple modifications to reflect a change in business. Creating a new pick and pack area, increasing buffer runs, transfer lanes or order diverts might be what is needed to increase your systems throughput, accuracy and reliability while reducing labor.
The ability to optimize not only people but technology as well is especially important during uncertain economic times. The economy seems to be growing, but constant political indecision and posturing can translate into rapid growth or hiring freezes and staff cuts. This means that labor-management has to be a major concern.
So having a conveyor system that is operating at peak performance means keeping on top of maintenance and having professional reviews and oversights to make sure nothing has been overlooked. Likewise creating a conveyor system that is able to communicate and give visibility to problems or issues prior to failure can be critical. UltraControls by ISD can be integrated to not only bring old systems back to life, but to perform as they have never performed before.
In this economic and political time of uncertainty, labor turnover and sometimes shortages of skilled labor, service is common sense and pro-active approach for organizations looking to maximize efficiencies.