Moving drums by hand truck or pallet is labor intensive and costly.

It’s a safe bet that the final cost of any product increases on account of its material handling function. In fact, the Material Handling Industry of America estimates that material handling can boost a product’s final sale-price up a stunning 40%. In today’s fast-moving blur of a global economy, companies simply cannot afford to skimp on the right kind of material handling for their products. Ignoring the problem of how best to ship their products can mean the difference between a company’s quarterly profit and its quarterly loss.

Technology can speed up the process and a provide a high ROI.

Take, for example, your typical warehousing operation in China from 15 years ago (this isn’t to say that many such operations don’t exist still today). Time and again, when we approached these warehouses about adopting our drum handling technology, we found staggering amounts of waste happening in their way of doing things. You would have two workers loading and unloading drums using a hand-truck or a wooden pallet.  For anyone who’s ever performed that kind of work, the labor intensiveness (and number of man hours involved) is well-known. While labor in China several years ago may have been abundant and inexpensive- that is not longer true.  Additionally, you simply cannot throw enough labor at a drum handling problem to move items fast enough to maintain the throughput required in these logistics operations.  It’s physically impossible to do.  But by using a forklift and a 2-drum attachment from Liftomatic, the number of man hours involved in loading and unloading gets reduced to maybe a half hour’s time, increasing efficiency and throughput. When you add up the sheer number of drums that many of these Chinese warehouses handle in the course of a month, you can begin to appreciate how Liftomatic drum handling equipment can save warehouses a (not so) small fortune in terms of ROI.

In the following entries, we will be taking a closer look at some of the ways that modernizing your material handling equipment can hugely impact your company’s ROI. We’ll explore such issues as storage capacity, drum damage, and safety. Furthermore, we invite anyone who’s had experience with optimizing their warehousing equipment and/or operating procedures to chime in on this blog.