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Are your material handling processes a competitive advantage or are they costing you money?

Whether you’re looking for massive leaps or incremental and continuous improvement in your operational effectiveness, your material handling processes are critical to explore. Before you go and explore, we have some helpful tips and resources you can use. In our upcoming series of articles, we will help you on your way to discovering the best solutions for your business when it comes to this critical area – whether this is your first time exploring the topic or you’ve made decisions regarding material handling in the past.

Are you confident in the caliber of your material handling processes; from the loading dock all the way through production?

If you’re not routinely thinking about your material handling processes, you may want to think again.

Material flow and material handling are key practices when managing and improving your operations. And if you need any convincing of this, you should read this article explaining the many benefits that result from continually assessing and improving them – including increased productivity and efficiency (doing more with less) and the improved health and safety of your team members and employees. On the flip side of that coin, you should consider the costs that result from mismanaging this part of your business.

Get the details in another helpful article.

3 Key Challenges of Optimizing Material Handling In Your Operation

With any operational improvements, there are three challenges you must face if you’re hoping to make the most impactful improvements to your business through optimizing material handling.

1. First, can your organization adequately identify or recognize where you have opportunities for improvement or problems you can rectify, either by changing your processes or with the addition or upgrading of equipment?
2. Next, consider how you might quantify the potential benefit to your business? How will a change or upgrade leverage opportunities or address problems?  What resources will it take to tackle these problems? What evidence do you need to convince yourself and any other stakeholders that the solution will provide a respectable ROI?
3. Lastly, are you confident in your organization’s ability to select an optimal solution – given the huge variety of techniques and equipment, both new and old, and material handling equipment manufacturers, that exist in today’s marketplace?

None of these are easy questions to answer. However, a little bit of knowledge and expertise on this topic can go a long way to improving safety, productivity and efficiency. Stay tuned, in the coming weeks we will have some helpful tips and resources that address each of these questions.