Powered Telescopic Belt Conveyors

Powered telescopic belt conveyors from North Conveyors Ltd. Vehicle and container unloading is one area of a warehouse or factory operation that consumes a lot of resource and is generally quite an inefficient process. Unloading of vehicles or containers requires operators to perform a lot of “non-value adding” activities, meaning they aren’t adding to the sale value of the product they are handling, by unloading it from a vehicle. The unloading process is pure overhead cost.

The ideal solution to problems such as this, would be to fully automate the process, removing human operators completely, replacing them with machinery to perform the mundane and repetitive tasks. The human operators can be moved to a different area of the building, to work on tasks that require dexterity and intelligence, while the machines perform the tasks that the operators didn’t really want to do anyway. However, vehicle unloading is notoriously difficult to fully automate.

In general, products for sale in the UK are brought in by container from places like China, where manufacturing costs are lower. The containers are packed from floor to ceiling with boxes of various sizes, to keep the shipping cost per unit as low as possible. When the containers arrive in the UK, the boxes inside have become a jumbled mess, meaning only human operators would be able to unload them.

Many automation companies have tried to crack the fully automated container unloading nut, but without success. Some companies claim to offer solutions, but in reality, the presentation of the product to the robot system is so random and ununiform, that automated systems are very unreliable, and do not offer the return on investment (ROI) that businesses require.

Therefore, solutions to remove as much of the manual handling as possible are the best approach, offering quick wins for businesses by removing a large amount of the “non-value adding” activities.

Powered telescopic belt conveyors from North Conveyors Ltd can help to remove a large amount of the walking distance from inside the container to the inside of the warehouse.

Powered telescopic belt conveyors are available to service warehouses and factories with raised docks, and are available with a variety of features and options, including a basket for the operator to ride in (with height adjustment), and scanning tunnel for scanning of barcodes.