MATERIALS HANDLING SYSTEM DESIGN - Environmentally Conscious Materials Handling - page 9

1. Life-cycle costs include capital investment, installation, setup and equip-
ment programming, training, system testing and acceptance, operating
(labor, utilities, etc.), maintenance and repair, reuse value, and ultimate
disposal.
2. A plan for preventive and predictive maintenance should be prepared for
the equipment, and the estimated cost of maintenance and spare parts
should be included in the economic analysis.
3. A long-range plan for replacement of the equipment when it becomes
obsolete should be prepared.
4. Although measurable cost is a primary factor, it is certainly not the only
factor in selecting among alternatives. Other factors of a strategic nature
to the organization that form the basis for competition in the marketplace
should be considered and quantified whenever possible.
These ten principles are vital to material handling system design and operation.
Most are qualitative in nature and require the industrial engineer to employ these
principles when designing, analyzing, and operating material handling systems.

3 TYPES OF MATERIAL HANDLING EQUIPMENT

In this section, we list various equipments that actually transfer materials between
the multiple stages of processing. There are a number of different types of
material handling devices (MHDs), most of which move materials via mate-
rial handling paths on the shop floor. However, there are some MHDs — such
as cranes, hoists, and overhead conveyors — that utilize the space above the
machines. The choice of a specific MHD depends on a number of factors, includ-
ing cost, weight, size, and volume of the loads; space availability; and types of
workstations. So, in some cases the MHS interacts with the other subsystems.
If we isolate MHS from other subsystems, we might get an optimal solution
relative to the MHDs but one that is suboptimal for the entire system.
There are seven basic types of MHDs (Heragu 2008): conveyors, palletizers,
trucks, robots, automated guided vehicles, hoists cranes and jibs, and warehouse
material handling devices. In this section, we will introduce the seven basic types
of MHDs. In the following section, we will discuss how to choose the “right”
equipment and how to operate equipment in the “right” way.

3.1 Conveyors

Conveyors are fixed-path MHDs. In other words, conveyors should be consid-
ered only when the volume of parts or material to be transported is large and
when the transported material is relatively uniform in size and shape. Depending
on the application, there are many types of conveyors — accumulation conveyor,
belt conveyor, bucket conveyor, can conveyor, chain conveyor, chute conveyor,
gravity conveyor, power and free conveyor, pneumatic or vacuum conveyor,