The Material Handling Blog

The fog of peak season. Does this sound like a similar experience to all warehouse operations team members? It’s earlier than usual and you know you have a very long day ahead of you. The building pulses with an electrifying energy but it's a frenetic, anxious feeling that everyone has in the pit of their stomach. The team knows that its “go time” as the customer order volume is going to be 3X the norm. As you walk out of the office and into the warehouse you are met with the sound of conveyor belts humming and the ceaseless beeping noise of forklifts darting all over the building. What is normally an orderly row of neatly stacked goods near pack out, now resembles a maze, as your team scrambles to locate items with urgency. Every corner of the warehouse is in motion, every aisle alive with the chaos of associates picking, workstations loaded with boxes for packout, and trailers are everywhere.

Sometimes it can be hard to make a decision, especially when that decision will cause major changes to the status quo or cost a lot of money. So how do you know you’re making the right choice? One way is to use the proven Bastian Consulting 5-step methodology, DMADV, as your decision making process. Read: The 5-Step Decision Making Process

If your business is in manufacturing or distribution, you are likely faced with a common dilemma in today's business environment -- lack of resources. Nowadays, businesses stay very lean in terms of personnel, and this often leads to some troubling questions for management. One answer might lie in the availability of a good field sales engineer. A field sales engineer (FSE) is an individual with both the sales and engineering experience needed to address technical solutions for your business.

Athletes train tirelessly to master their chosen skill. Countless hours are dedicated to perfect each movement, lower reaction time, and increase strength. The same can be said for professionals and laborers alike. Each group either does or can benefit from dedicated, focused instruction. Whether it is a coach, a professor, or a mentor, these individuals provide guidance to ensure correct implementation of vital tasks.

With the summer project season just around the corner many industrial manufacturing companies are shoring up plans for their big projects. I recently had the pleasure to walk a manufacturing plant from front to back and back to front again in search of automated material handling opportunities. It certainly was a shocking experience because in this case, the client went naked! While this client was the expert on their systems and operations, a trained eye in material handling-- especially robotic --was a welcome investment of their time.

An Engineering Study is an inexpensive and efficient way to add temporary expertise to help study a distribution or manufacturing issue and come up with an engineered solution. At Bastian Solutions, we identify and measure several key performance indicators that, in most situations, management doesn’t have the time or the experienced staff required to...

For those of you in the material handling or manufacturing industry, there is a good chance that you are working with a system that is quickly becoming outdated. With today's idea of "buy today, ship tomorrow" online shopping mentality, your system could easily become overwhelmed, especially if downsizing has resulted from the recent economy. But how do you even start to improve?...