How Lift Truck Innovation Can Improve Your Bottom-Line

摘要

Manufacturing steel involves complex and heavy duty materials handling processes. In these processes, lift trucks play a key role moving raw materials such as iron, as well as semi-finished and finished steel products, including steel coil, pipe, slabs, long bars, billets or pipes. Whether a lift truck is transporting a semi-finished product to the next production step or a finished item to shipping it is of upmost importance that the product is moved on time, or the production process may stall or halt, requiring that the lift truck to be a dependable workhorse of many production locations. Even though lift trucks are integral to the successful and continuous production cycles, mill operators often do not wish to focus on the procurement or up-keep of these machines. Several reasons can be listed for this behavior, but most noteworthy are the mill operator's desire to focus on their core business of steel making. Another factor is that the cost of running lift trucks only represents a small portion of the overall operating budget of a steel mill. Nonetheless, today steel mills are operated on very tight budgets and it is important to make every dollar count. This leads to the need of minimizing the cost per ton of steel shipped. Newer material handling technologies and innovations can drive cost savings in this area. This paper discusses such improvements and provides a cost savings analysis for different cost categories.