What is Material Handling?

Material handling plays a significant function in manufacturing and logistics.Materials handling is a process of loading, shifting, and unloading of materials from one site to another site.

Materials handling is a process of loading, shifting, and unloading of materials from one site to another site.

It implicates a short-distance motion within a building or between a building and a conveyance vehicle.

This branch covers all of the fundamental operations concerned with the movement of bulk, packaged, or distinctive products in the solid or semi-solid form using material handling equipment.

One of the important facts of consideration is to perform material handling with safety and economically using different types of gadgets, tackles, and equipment.

The commodities of physical commerce have been shipped on a conveyor or lift truck or some other material handling equipment within manufacturing plants, storages, and retail stores.

In the primitive era, man used wheels, pulleys & levers for moving the material mechanically from one location to another.

Animal carts, chain-pulley system, rope-pulley, and many more came afterward.

As the human necessities for livelihood and development in life increase, other forms of material handling were invented.

Main Objectives of Material Handling are:

1. To improve productivity.

2. To decrease mate handling expenses.

3. To develop safety & working conditions.

4. To enhance the efficiency of material flow by assuring the availability of materials(when and where they required).

4. To facilitate manufacturing methods.

Material handling is required as part of every production worker’s employment. Around 650,000 people in the U.S. work as dedicated “material moving machine operators”.

These operators utilize MH appliances to transport numerous goods in a variety of industries.

MH operates a wide variety of manual, semi-automated, and automatic appliances and also contemplates the protection, warehouse, and control of materials during manufacturing, storing, allotment, consumption, and discarding.

Manual handling indicates the usage of a worker’s hands for moving, lifting, lowering, filling, emptying, or carrying them.

It can lead to the physical injuries of workers implicating strains and sprains to the lower back, shoulders, upper limbs, and other body parts.

In accordance to reduce manual handling injuries, ergonomic advancements can be used.

These developments can involve reconfiguring the task, using proper positioning of equipment like lift/tilt/turntables, to alleviate reaching, bending, and traumas.