Material Handling

Name of student

College

Date
 Material Handling

Costs

There are various considerations that should be made when picking the material handling

technique to be applied. These are safety, quality, labor, power and equipment costs. The method

being used right now where two temporary workers work for one week, twice a year to manually

offload the pallets and then transfer them using a forklift is quite expensive.

Calculating the labor cost,

labour cost=work hours∗wage

¿ 4∗40∗7.5/hour

¿ $ 1,200

This cost may not seem like it’s an expensive investment. However, other factors have to

be taken into consideration such as time used and quality of service. The offloading process takes

a week. This period taken to offload utilizes a forklift which is probably used in the plant

production. This can stall other processes that may have required the usage of the said forklift.

This slow offloading may also slow down some processes that require the products being

offloaded. The overall production cost that is met by manual offloading is therefore higher than

the $1,200.

The principle of performance states that the material handling costs are continuous.

material handling hours

percentage of material handling=
total labour hours

Using the manual method utilizes a very high percentage of material handling time and

costs.

Safety
 The method of offloading does not meet the safety standards. A person expected to lift a

material of over 100 pound when performing a particular task, there can be long term effects

such as the cumulative trauma disorder. The method being used is not the best method of

operation. The reason being that the cumulative trauma disorder and injuries due to work have

become a very costly factor in the production industry. The U.S.A Bureau of labor indicates that

there is an increase in the reported incidences of disorders that are related with repeated trauma

(Robinson 2009). Each of the bags weigh 80 pounds. One man lifting it will definitely suffer

from back aches at the end of the task. The manual lifting cannot be termed as a safe working

condition. A more safe method which does not involve manual lifting is recommended.

With these threats of cumulative trauma, the company may be required to heavily

compensate the workers if they get injured at work. The compensation will be high. It will

reduce the optimal costs that the company is trying to maintain right now. It will also have

rendered these workers, less productive to the company and to themselves too. This might turn to

be a very costly affair in the long run.

Equipment Improvement

Material handling equipment has greatly reduced the drudgery of work. A more efficient

equipment reduces the cost of production. It also improves the quality of work life for the

employees. In this case, material handling equipment should be employed to eliminate the

manual lifting. One should always strive to maximize or optimize the quantity, size and weight

of the load being handled. This will reduce the number of movements and trips that are required

to transport the materials. Caution should be taken that the load is not increased at the expense of

inventory.
 Figure 1: stacked up fork-lift.

Another alternative that should be considered to handle this task is adding another

forklift. This may seem like an expensive affair at first, but in the long run it pays off. The

recommendation from this is that the current method should undergo some improvement so as to

reduce the offloading period and increase safety of operation.

The whole period taken to offload the materials is four weeks and working 40 hours a

day. This implies that the annual cost for this job is $1,200. Other methods, can be applied,

which might be a little more expensive but more efficient and highly safe. One alternative option

to this method is hiring a forklift in the peak periods. The peak periods in this instance are twice

a year when loading.

The cost of hiring a forklift is approximately $350 per week. This is a forklift with a

capacity of 4000 lbs (Meyers 2013). The cost of running it will also not be extremely high as

they will run to approximately $200 dollars for running and operation costs. Buying a forklift

will be a very expensive investment, where return on investment will be slow. A new forklift will

cost approximately $15,000. Purchasing a new one will be unprofitable as it will be used only

twice a year. This will not be productive and it will not be saving any costs for the company

(Meyers 2013). Hiring is only on a need to use basis.

 Figure 2: comparison of material handling costs

Quality

Using a forklift also improves the quality of service. The time used by a forklift to

offload the pallets will be shorter than that used by the two temporary workers. The time saved to

offload can be seen as a profitable mark to the organization. Probably the long offloading period

was hindering other production processes from commencing. Reducing the offloading period is

therefore a welcome move as a halt in production to allow for offloading will take a very short

duration. A forklift will stack up the pallets thus faster in offloading. This is optimizing the

quantity and size of the load.

Using a forklift to offload the pallets also reduces the chances of the firm being given

injury claims by the workers. There will be minimal instances of back aches as there will be no

manual lifting. As long as the operators are trained on the safe operation techniques, there will be

minimal accidents experienced. This, is therefore, a more safe offloading technique than the

manual one.

It can be concluded that hiring a forklift in the pea offloading periods is the best way to

improve this material handling process. It will take a shorter period of time thus reducing the
production stoppage time. It will also be a safe material handling technique eliminating the

possibility of the firm being issued with compensation claims from injured workers.
 References

Material handling management. (2000). Cleveland. OH: Penton Media.

Meyers, F. E. (2013). Plant layout and material handling. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Regents/Prentice Hall.

Robins Conveying Belt Company., & Fraser & Chalmers Engineering Works (Great Britain).

(2009). Robins handbook: Material, handling, equipment. New York.