A large manufacturer of commercial HVAC systems placed its bulk components for installation on industrial carts. It staged in the line at each work cell allowing operators to easily retrieve their next unit using an overhead jib boom and manually rotated the deck to allow easy access to the large dunnage from one side. Previously full dunnage was dropped and empties retrieved by forklifts. This created an unsafe situation for assemblers, who were often standing in the narrow aisles where forklift operators were maneuvering the loads.
Several manufacturers are implementing material handling strategies known as “mother/daughter” (M/D) cart delivery systems to improve operations. The M/D cart delivery system typically has two small carts within a larger cart. Bulk parts can be manually or forklift-loaded onto the two daughter carts in the stock or storage area. One or two complete M/D frames can be towed by a tugger to line-side positions and “dropped” for the assemblers to use, or daughter carts are removed and positioned for use in the cells.
The M/D approach simplifies delivery. It allows the daughter carts to be unloaded without disconnecting carts in a train and permits the selection of any daughter cart in the mother train without regard for sequence position, simplifying loading for delivery.
Sara Pearson Specter, Editor at Large for Modern Materials Handling noted that manufacturing facilities are continuously looking to get lean while meeting the increasing expectations of consumers for mass customization of products. Couple those challenges with an aging workforce and—in many parts of the country—a difficulty attracting and retaining qualified workers, the resulting solution for some companies has been the implementation of a designed lean material flow system.
The key to those systems, according to Ed Brown, founder of Topper Industrial, is the reduction of a facility’s current fleet of fork trucks by replacing some of them with tugger and cart systems. A fork truck is not safest way to move materials, nor the most efficient. By 2020 most manufacturing facilities will have replaced the fork truck with tugger and cart systems replacing one-load-at-a-time deliveries by fork trucks. The new solution will transform the production floor by acting trains, or a linked series of multiple carts, carrying multiple loads in one trip. The carts themselves may be loaded by a fork truck, but a tugger will handle the deliveries.
Delivering smaller lots more frequently in kitted and sequenced cart orders is an engineered response to the complexity of mass customization. Building multiple product lines on the same production floor or offering a selection of options to customize a standard product, require the flexibility that carts provide.
Brown is the leading patent holder of these industrial carts which have evolved into specialized tools used in engineered processes to move materials as efficiently as possible.
By Thomas R. Cutler, Manufacturing Journalist for Topper Industrial – Material Handling Solutions
Visit Topper Industrial at MODEX 2016. Booth 647.
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