Shining a light on safety and efficiency in the supply chain

Overview
An international lighting company distributes delicate and sophisticated lighting equipment globally. This is a new client engagement for Cherry’s Industrial Equipment, a client that came to us with a need: to address a specific challenge concerning the way one of its suppliers shipped product to the company’s California location. Jason Podjasek is the Account Manager at Cherry’s who worked with this client to understand its challenges and help provide a solution.


The Challenge
One of the product suppliers for this lighting company would ship product – containing delicate lighting components – by boat from Asia to the lighting company’s California facility. The product would be shipped with the pallets arranged vertically. However, to be stored in the California warehouse, the product would need to be stored horizontally instead meaning that the pallets would need to be re-oriented. An added challenge is that the product would ship on non-standard sized 53” pallets.
 
One means of addressing the challenge would be for workers to unload and restack the pallets, requiring numerous labor hours and bringing with it the increased chance of workplace injury. The pallets weigh up to 1500 pounds each, in addition to containing fragile components.


The Solution
The lighting company sought a solution that would efficiently address the need to re-orient the pallets for storage at the California facility; and in so doing, avoid the potential for workforce injury resulting from workers unloading and restacking the heavy pallets.
 
Jason said, “We used our proven consultative approach to identify their problems and come up with a tailored solution.”
 
Cherry’s worked with the company’s team to custom-design a pallet tipper to meet their specific facility needs. A pallet tipper would provide the means of efficiently re-orienting the pallets without the need for human handling of the product. This would save hundreds of worker hours and virtually eliminate the possibility of injury.
 
To address the issue of the non-standard sized pallets, Cherry’s introduced grippers which would hold the pallets in place as they were being moved.


The Results
Jason says, “Our customized tipper saves the client 75% of the time it would have taken to do the re-positioning of the pallets manually. Ergonomically, and from a perspective of safety and productivity, the Cherry’s solution helped this company meet its challenge.”


Conclusion
Every client challenge presents an opportunity. In this case, without the Cherry’s solution, the supply chain for this lighting company would have been at the least delayed if humans had needed to re-orient the pallets for warehouse storage. We are pleased to have been able to solve this client’s problem in a way that benefitted them, and we believe it may lead to future engagements with this company.