Material handling is an important element, which determines the productivity of a warehouse. Material handling is highly labor intensive as compared to any other operations in a warehouse. Therefore the personnel cost in material handling is usually high. Most of the activities in material handling require significant manual handling and hence has little benefits from computerization and improved information technology.
Objectives / Roles
- Handling
The primary handling objective in a warehouse is to sort inbound shipment according to precise customer requirements. The three handling activities are receiving, in-storage handling and shipping.
- Receiving:
When material reaches the warehouse it has to be received by the warehouse. One of the important activities here is to unload the goods from the transportation vehicle. Most of the time unloading is done manually. Containerized or unit-load shipments considerably reduce the unloading time.
- In-storage Handling:
In-storage handling consists of all movement within a warehouse facility. The two types of in-storage handling are transfer and section.
Various transfers of goods happen within the warehouse. The goods as soon as they are received in the warehouse are transferred to the storage area. The second transfer may be required during order selection where goods are transferred from storage area to order selection area. The final transfer of goods takes place when the goods are finally shipped from the warehouse. Here the goods are transferred from the or election to the shipping or outbound area.
Selection activity basically involves selecting different materials and is grouped to meet the , customer demand. The idea of using warehouse as a selection area is to reduce the overall transportation cost.
- Shipping: Shipping consists of checking and loading orders onto transportation vehicles. As in receiving, shipping is manually performed in most systems.
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