How Are Conveyors Used in Manufacturing?
Conveyors are essential for manufacturing companies to boost productivity, minimize costs, and reduce the risk of injury to workers, which all lead to boosted sales revenue and profit margins.
Various conveyor products and solutions are used in an extensive range of industries, from packaging, chemical, agricultural, pharmaceutical, automotive, and aerospace to the food industry.
This constantly evolving technology has allowed manufacturing businesses to ensure undisrupted operations in the facility and meet the market demand in a breeze by moving products or raw materials automatically from one point to another in the facility. If you’re interested in knowing what conveyors are and their use in manufacturing, keep reading this article!
What Is a Conveyor Belt and How Does It Work?
Using advanced technology, conveyor belts are mechanical devices, mostly powered by AC or DC motors, which help transport raw materials and products from one place to another in the warehouse. They make sure that there’s no damage to delicate products and that they are safely and efficiently transported without affecting workers’ productivity.
You can find a variety of conveyor belts in the market, like gravity roller, chain, overhead, and even tube conveyors. However, the most common ones in the manufacturing industry are roller, slat, and belt/mesh conveyors.
What Are Conveyors Used For?
Nowadays, smooth operations of manufacturing industries without conveyors are almost impossible. The two primary purposes of conveyors in manufacturing are to move items or materials and to store or buffer them.
1. Moving Materials
- Movement of items from point A to B
Rather than asking your workers to manually lift and carry products from one place to another in the facility, conveyor belts make it extremely convenient and efficient to do this job automatically.
You also don’t have to cause any clutter in the warehouse and, at the same time, minimize the use of forklifts, which can be put to another use.
- Carrying heavy loads
Even if you want to carry the heaviest item in your facility, the conveyors will do the job for you. Of course, such strenuous tasks can’t be performed by workers and even forklifts, which is why conveyors come in handy.
On the other hand, some products may be too fragile and come with a high risk of human error, so conveyors eliminate this risk and save you stress and extra cost.
- Assembly operations
Assembly operations are a common need in the automotive and food industries. As laborers work on the final touches of the products manually, conveyor belts slow down and allow them to perform their tasks while staying in one place for added convenience and effectiveness.
- Complete automation
100% automated conveyor systems entirely nullify the need for manual labor by letting robots perform all the tasks, such as delivering or receiving items from the conveyor belt. This leads to cost savings and improved productivity in the production facility.
2. Storing and Buffering
Other than the main conveyor belts’ purpose, which is to move products from one point to another, they can also be used to store materials between the different stages of production.
Most conveyors can also buffer, i.e., decrease or increase the number of products stored in them by controlling their movement to ensure production flow isn’t disrupted.
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