Five Considerations When Selecting Sortation Conveyor
Selecting the Right Sortation Conveyor Requires Both Insight and Foresight
A sortation conveyor system is an automated solution designed to efficiently organize and distribute items based on predetermined criteria such as destination, size, or weight. Often found in manufacturing plants, distribution centers, and e-commerce fulfillment centers, sortation conveyors are crucial in streamlining activity by rapidly segregating diverse items into specific categories, product groupings, destinations, packaging, etc. These systems enhance operational efficiency, reduce labor costs, minimize errors, and ultimately contribute to faster and more accurate order fulfillment, making them essential for industries reliant on timely and precise inventory management.
Selecting a sortation conveyor solution for your facility can involve a substantial investment in hardware and software that can also be expensive to reconfigure if your requirements change. To optimize your investment dollar, you’ll need to answer the following 5 questions. Be sure to define your current needs and any future expectations your team is considering.
- Inventory Specs
- Throughput
- Space Availability
- Application
- Budget
With that background in place, let’s take a deeper look at each of the 5 criteria needed to configure your sortation conveyor solution.
1. What Are the Physical Attributes of the Products You Are Sorting?
Sortation conveyor designs cover a vast range of techniques and technologies. Suppose you are sorting a relatively consistent size of medium-weight products packaged in cardboard boxes. In that case, your options differ from sorting garments packaged in plastic bags or suspended from hangars. Size, shape, weight, and physical characteristics play a big role in the sortation conveyor best suited for your application. Product fragility plays a big part, too. A shoe or slot sorter might be ideal for electronics packaged in boxes that aren’t too weighty, whereas for sweaters packed in plastic, a tilt-tray sorter works very well.
Another consideration is future needs. If your facility will be sorting the same products five years from now as it is today, you can be comfortable settling on one type of sorter. If your product mix changes regularly or will change in the future, consider specifying a system that allows your distribution center to handle different types of products flexibly.
2. What is the Throughput Rate Your Facility Needs to Achieve?
The speed at which products in your facility move and need to be sorted is a major factor in the type of sortation system you select and the elements of the technology your facility needs to employ to achieve that sortation rate. Questions that need to be answered are:
- What is our usual throughput rate in units/minute, per hour, per shift?
- What is the variability of that rate? Are there waves of products, like when trucks are unloaded? Or seasonal variations?
- Does my budget allow me to employ the fastest and most flexible system? The faster the sortation, the more expensive the system.
3. What Are My Space Limitations?
Different types of sortation conveyors require different amounts of floor space. The size of your warehouse and the available floor space may limit the selection of sortation conveyors you can use. Do you have vertical space available? Can the sortation systems be designed as a loop, or does it need to be linear with a number of branches coming off the main conveyor line?
4. What is the Application of the Sortation Conveyor?
A sortation system designed for sorting products being unloaded from trucks and headed for storage may be configured much differently than a sortation system separating items destined to ship to a multitude of retail stores. Again, size, weight, and variability of products are determining factors, as are how many sources/destinations have to be built into the system. Do packing stations or shipping stations need to be set up? All of these considerations impact the choice of sortation conveyor that best fits your application.
5. And, Of Course, What is Your Budget?
Can you afford to employ the most elegant technological sortation solution… or do you even need it? Sortation systems can be very complex, employing sensors, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), mechanical devices for executing the sortation, and software that can feed data into your WCS or WMS. The level of automation required in your application will be a huge determinant of the cost of your sortation conveyor system.
A well-designed sortation system can drastically improve the efficiency of your warehouse, production plant, or distribution center. However, selecting a sortation conveyor system is a complex, multi-faceted process that begins with asking many questions. The experienced design team at Apex is at your service at every step of the process to provide you with a sortation system design that will serve your current needs and future needs. Give us a call today!
