The Material Handling Blog

When people hear the term 3PL, they might ask questions such as: “What is a 3PL?” A 3PL or third-party logistics is a business that provides logistics operations to other business. These value-added logistic services include:

The festive or peak season is one of the busiest times for companies, especially those in the e-commerce and retail industry sectors. With the holidays here, consumer demand for products significantly spikes both in volume and quick fulfilment requirements. With continuous festive promotions and sales, it is understandable that there is an increase in orders with more customer expectations, so it is crucial to have efficient and reliable warehouse material handling systems in place to handle the festive season demand. Determining the specific requirements of your business during the festive season is essential to ensuring a smooth and successful operation.

Efficient and streamlined operations are vital for the success of any industry. In India, companies are constantly seeking innovative solutions to improve productivity, reduce costs and enhance overall efficiency. ‘Research and Markets’ reports that India’s warehousing market is expected to reach INR 2,872.10 bn by 2027.One significant aspect of achieving these goals lies in optimizing material handling and warehouse operation processes.

The heart of most distribution centers today is sortation. If it is applied correctly, products are efficiently routed to appropriate areas of the facility. Applied incorrectly, and the consequences can be catastrophic, often times costing companies millions of dollars in wasted labor and non-value added processes. Read: Your Guide to Sortation Conveyors

With the boom in the ecommerce market, companies will have to optimize outbound processes in order to keep up with the race and continue to meet customer expectations – correct orders with on time fulfilment. Let's look at how.

The warehousing industry has grown in the last few years by becoming more intentionally planned, multifaceted and accessible. It’s a push towards automation. This will progress further in the upcoming years, especially as companies look to meet customer’s fast fulfilment expectations and challenges like labour and real estate availability continue. The last few decades have shed a light on how products get to consumers, bringing increased attention to warehousing and distribution which has evolved the focus bringing substantial study and investment.

For decades, conveyor systems have been crucial for warehousing and logistics operations. Conveyor systems are used in all fundamental warehouse processes to transport raw materials out of storage to the production line, move products into other storage devices, and move final product into packaging lines, or transport packaged products to shipping. It is the most basic automation for anyone in the facility to transfer materials between long distances on varying elevations.

Our second webinar of the Supply Chain Explained: LIVE series featured advice from Bastian Solutions’ Director of Consulting, Jason Tenorio, on challenges everyone in the B2B warehousing world is facing.

Due to the rapidly expanding industry of ecommerce, ease of installation and maintenance of conveyor systems is exceedingly critical to remain competitive in today’s material handling market. The more complicated the system, the more of an impact this can have on its design and success as a solution. In material conveyance terms, sortation is one of the most complicated problems out there. Typical medium rate sortation requires AC power, DC power, and pneumatics for successful sortation of packages up to 75 pounds in weight. They provide rates up to 300FPM at 85CPMwith a maximum sorter length of 150ft. Bastian Solutions’ conveyor team has now developed a solution that provides the same speed at 90CPM, an unlimited maximum sorter length, and requires nothing but low-voltage DC power for operation, all while offering competitive pricing; the Modular Sorter.

With so many options available, choosing the right type of divert for your sortation system can be difficult. These are the factors to consider.

Single item sortation is frequently used to quickly fill multiple orders that contain similar items. Here's how it works.

Zone skipping is a logistics technique where companies ship their products directly to sorting facilities close to the final ship-to destination.  Zone skipping can result in a significant savings as the costs associated with multiple sort and transfer points by the carrier are eliminated.