specialreport
BY SUSAN K. LACEFIELD, ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR
Teaching an old
dog new tricks
Cookware company
Meyer knew that
overhauling its poorly
performing palletizer
and conveyors could
improve productivity
at the dock. What
the company didn’t
expect was to
stumble upon a
whole new use for
the equipment.
AS PART OF YOUR MAINTENANCE ROUTINE, DO YOU EVALUATE YOUR
material handling systems to make sure they’re meeting expectations? If not, maybe
you should. Doing this type of periodic analysis can be well worth the effort. In addition to exposing existing problems, this sort of exercise may point you to new ways to
use the equipment.
Consider the case of cookware manufacturer and distributor Meyer Corp., U.S. In
2009, the company, whose products include such well-known brands as Anolon,
Circulon, and Farberware, was uncomfortably aware that its existing palletizer and
supporting conveyor system wasn’t performing to standard.
The palletizer had been installed five years previously to speed up the inbound container unloading process. The idea was that as trucks arrived at dock doors, merchandise would be unloaded and whisked to the palletizer by a spaghetti-like network of
conveyors. The palletizer would then automatically stack the
items on pallets, and the pallets would be sent to storage.
Had the equipment worked correctly, it should
have increased throughput twofold over
offloading containers manually. But Meyer
was never able to get the conveyors and the
palletizer to play well together. “It never
really reached its potential,” says Mark
Warcholski, Meyer’s director of warehouse
operations. It got to the point where the
