Manufacturing Material Handling Solutions

A manufacturing plant does not have a storage problem. It has six of them, and one product rarely solves them all: bulk raw material near receiving, work in process moving between cells, kits that need labeled locations, tooling that has to be found in seconds, a maintenance storeroom full of low-value parts whose only job is to be there at 2 a.m., and finished goods that stage, count and ship.

This page is the map: what a plant stores and moves, what belongs in each area, and how to choose between shelving, carts, workstations, rack, cages, mezzanines and offices. Where a topic deserves full treatment we link to the page that owns it.

MH-USA has laid out plant floors from Salt Lake City since 1997 and ships nationwide. Most of our manufacturing projects start the same way: a walk through the building with a notebook, counting how many times each part gets picked up before it becomes product.

Two zone rules matter more than product choice. Every zone needs a defined overflow location, or material lands in the nearest open floor space. And aisles are equipment: decide the handling method first, then draw the aisle.

Label discipline holds it together. A location system — aisle, bay, level, position — costs almost nothing next to the shelving, and it is what converts storage into inventory you can count.

An assembly bench is a productivity device, not furniture. What matters is surface height, reach envelope, what sits above the surface and what the surface has to survive. Get height wrong and you buy fatigue and quality problems for the life of the cell.

Height first: seated precision work, standing assembly and heavy work want different surface heights, and a mixed-use cell wants an adjustable bench. Surface second: laminate for light dry assembly, steel or stainless where tools and fluids land, ESD-safe surfaces for electronics.

Above the surface is where benches are won. A riser with cantilevered shelves gets bins, fixtures and instructions off the work surface and into the operator’s line of sight. Task light and power belong on the riser, not clamped to the bench edge.

The detailed treatment of bench types, heights, accessories and cell layout lives on assembly workstations.

Controlled storage exists for three reasons, and the reason picks the product. Accountability — knowing who has the fixture — needs sign-out discipline and defined locations more than a lock. Loss prevention needs a real barrier. Segregation — quarantine, customer-owned or hazardous material — needs a defined, restricted area.

The lightest solution is security shelving: enclosure panels and locking sliding doors turn a standard unit into a lockable cabinet in the same footprint, stationary or mobile. Whole areas — a tool crib, a hazmat corner, a dock cage — use welded wire partitions.

A good tool crib has a location for every item, one controlled door, a pass-through, and a sign-out method somebody enforces. Perishable tooling belongs on min/max like MRO.

For welded wire partitions, dock cages and full plant enclosures, see manufacturing security cages.

Utah plants sit in an active seismic region along the Wasatch Front, and storage is one of the things building departments look at. Tall shelving and rack are heavy and top-loaded, and unanchored they are among the first things to move in an earthquake — a life-safety issue in the aisles where people work before it is an inventory issue.

Anchoring is a system, not a bolt. Seismic posts, base plates, post clamps that tie adjacent units together, foot plate kits and sway brace kits exist so a unit transfers load into the slab instead of walking across it. Rack adds its own footplates, anchors and row ties.

Sort out three things early: the slab, the height-to-depth ratio of the unit, and whether the jurisdiction wants an engineer-stamped drawing — that last one drives schedule more than product availability. The habit that pairs with anchoring: heavy on the bottom, light on top, nothing above the top shelf.