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f COLIN HARDIE, AssocInstT MIMH

,

1EFORE speculating on any future developments in handling in road transport it may be helpful to consider the motives which have led to the introducri of mechanical loading and unloading hi the past and progress made up to the present.

Ile objectives of mechanical handling in transport are, in other industries, increased efficiency and lower costs. ese can be achieved through reduction of direct labour vent in loading and unloading operations--including, of trse, transhipment and accelerated vehicle turn-round. is rare for mechanization to produce any increase in yload—rather the reverse. Indeed, progress in body tign, such as the use of polyurethane foam combined .11 one-piece moulding in reinforced plastic for insulated licks, has been directed towards counterbalancing the verse effects on the net payload of palletization and other it-load techniques.

Any loss of payload caused by unit loads is less serious efficiency is improved at more than one location; this tild apply with standard pallets or containers compatible :h handling appliances at both senders' and consignees' :mises.

In theory, the advantages of improved handling accrue

to both users and providers of road transport. The former can benefit directly through reduced bank labour, smaller areas in factories and warehouses devoted to the unproductive operations of vehicle loading and unloading, and load assembly and dispersion: and indirectly through the elimination of loss and damage in transit and curtailed overall transit times. Hauliers should obtain greater vehicle productivity and lower shed operating costs in circumstances, such as parcels carrying, where transhipment and sorting are involved.

Projection of Factory

The exact ways in which senders and consignees employ mechanical handling to achieve these general aims will depend on individual circumstances. Ideally, mechanical loading and unloading should take the form of a projection of the systems adopted in the factory warehouse or transit shed without detriment to the economic efficiency of the related transport operations.

Thus, recent major industrial installations have incorporated the direct connection of dispatch and reception storage conveyors in a warehouse with loading and unloading conveyors which can be extended into vehicle interiors--as at the British Shoe Corporation Braunstone warehouse; and the linking, through conveyors. lowerators and automatic palleti7ers. of a machine which fills 12.000 cans an hour with the palletized loading of transport vehicles by a team of fork trucks--at the Shell refinery at Hamburg.

In the field of specialized transport, liquids, powders and granular products are increasingly carried in bulk in circumstances in which it is economic to hold them in bulk at the points of dispatch and receipt, loading and unloading between vehicle and static container being by gravity, pressure or suction.

In these circumstances the transport function itself is subservient to the requirements of the terminal. although mechanized loading and unloading is, in turn, dependent on the haulier or other transport agent supplying suitable vehicles— either common-user or specialized. Where expensive handling plant is involved, it is equally important that vehicles are presented in a regular stream in a working day, so that the equipment works to capacity.

Control techniques applied to those modern precision handling appliances which are particularly susceptible to remote control and electronic programming—for example, stacker cranes and accumulator live storage systems--are already sufficiently advanced in the United Kingdom to provide a fully automated system for a throughout transit operation where this can be financially justified.

As a hypothetical instance, books received packaged from the printer could be transported, stored in two echelons in the same or separate premises and transferred to packing stations for making up into retail dispatches without manual handling either in these operations or in connecting transport vehicles.

Arrangements could incorporate a pallet "silo" for the bulk store (pallet racking 60 ft. high is already in use in this way in Germany); covered road vehicles susceptible to the automatic loading and discharge of pallet by means of roller decks and subdecks; programmed stacker cranes (at least one American design is already in operation and an improved British type derived from equipment originally produced for

handling of radio-active materials should be available soon: omatic motorized live storage. accumulator, and selfexing conveyors; packing and labelling machines: and autotic palletizers (for the initial receipt of the traffic from the nter and the final presentation of retail orders—packed in adard outer cartons--to the public carrier).

kt the new Bass automatic despatch warehouse at Burtonm-Trent. casks are transferred without manual intervention far as the tail of a number of alternative vehicles by means a combination of live storage and travelling conveyors. hough the sorting and movement of casks is controlled totely from a manual console and the actual stowage on the lick is by hand, this scheme does point the way towards a npletely automated dispatch process.

)ispatches of food products from a wholesale or manufaci:.r's warehouse to retailers, for example, will in the future bably be carried out with automated loading bays based on iveyors and computers. A set-up of this tYpe can he isaged in a warehouse divided into separate zones, each )eated to a group of commodities and manned by an order ker who would receive his instructions from a computer A central dispatch office. The latter could he some distance ly and a single office could be equipped to deal with a otter of warehouses irrespective of their geographical ations.

nputer—controlled Picking Elie order picker might well he directed through a display tel On which instructions from the computer would be own at intervals commensurate with the estim.ated time uired to pick each order and forward it to.the loading area. k technique of this,.sort is already employed in at least one Minental grocery warehouse in which orders are manually ked on to pallets carried by driverless pallet trucks. These omatically follow a variable path through the warehouse, ting for appropriate intervals at picking-up points controlled computer-prepared tape. An illuminated display panel on truck indicates to the operative which goods are to be ked up at each stop and the lime allowed.

7omplcied zone contributions of each customer's order uld be transferred by conveyor to the dispatch department ere they would be ploughed off by an automatic indexing tem on to branch conveyors feeding the interior of the ivery vehicles concerned. Here computer control would tire, by the presentation of the picking-up instructions to warehouse zones in the correct sequence. that the different is of a consignee's complete order arrived at the vehicle the same time and that each delivery would be presented the vehicle in order of drop.

t' plastics or similar lightweight containers were utilized in ijunetion with dragline conveyors as opposed to the movent of individual packages on pallet conveyors it is not too fanciful to forecast that the manual stowage of the traffic on the vehicles could be eliminated. The containers would he checked on electronically and automatically stowed by the branch conveyors. These would not only extend into the vehicle interiors but also lira and slew so as to tier the containers in their exact travelling positions. The containers themselves could he constructed to stack filled and nest when empty so that as deliveries proceeded empty containers at tit< rear of the vehicle would occupy the minimum floor space, thus giving access to the interior.

Tailboard Lifts

For ease of working at delivery noints, the vehicles could he equipped with suitable tailboard lifts. Stand loading at the warehouse • might well he a prerequisite of such a system. involving demountable vehicle bodies which would in any case probably be inote susceptible to the precise location for loading needed for the automated conveyors.

Much of the equipment required for the different stages of such it scheme is already available or can be expected to be developed during the next few years. For example, fast moving small components are now moved from storage to packing station, at the recently opened spare-parts warehouse of the Ford Motor Co. near Cologne in self-indexing plastics bins which travel along dragline conveyors. Equipment based on the remotely controlled mechanical hands now used feu manipulating radio active materials could he adapted for electronic order picking up from live storage or static racking.

Current technical developments in handling and the more generous provisions of loday's Construction and Use regulations leave the door wide open for advances in mechanind loading techniques towards the ultimate of complete automation. Ft is reasonable 10 suppose that the more sophisticated schemes for loading and unloading road vehicles at works or warehouses will follow such lines.

There are, of course, many simpler developments which can be foreseen for improved handling in transport that do not depend on sophisticated and expensive equipment, the first and operating costs of which are often difficult to justify. Nor is automation a virtue in itself. For some functions it would be much cheaper and only marginally less efficient to substitute operator control for automatic programming.•

A scheme recently announced hr the Eastern Gas Board for issuing installation components to its service vans on art imprest system by means of modular bins-7perhans the smallest form of unit -load---is a. good example of .what can be done to improve dispatch handling at very little expense. Here replacement vehicle loads .tire assembled in small plastics bins on

trolleys before a van arrives. Loading itself takes place by exchanging full and empty bins between trolley and van rack at the vehicle tail or. in the case Of the larger vans fitted with tail hoists,. within the vehicle itself. More general development

expected of this method which is still in principle the extension into the transport vehicle of a handling technique evolved in the first place for an internal process.

The use of unit loads in the shape of pallets or containers for the through movement of traffic, including mechanized transhipment as well as primary loading and unloading, has developed rapidly over the past decade. Nevertheless, the progress made represents only a fraction of the complete potential of the unit-load technique within road haulage in its important role as a feeder and ancillary to other transport media as well as for purely road movements. It is to be expected that unit loads will penetrate even further into road haulage as development is assisted by the introduction of national and international constructional and dimensional standards for pallets and containers, apart from the stimulus given by further technical progress.

A continuance of the recent trend to cheapen the transport of unit loads by introducing expendable pallets and containers is likely In this way the cost of returning empties to the point of origin, which is an inhibiting factor in further expansion, should be eliminated. The search for a truly economic, general-purpose, expendable pallet has been unsuccessful up to the present although a number of designs have been introduced for specific types of load. As expendable pallets have little or no rigidity, their use is generally restricted to traffics which themselves impart the necessary rigidity to the units when lifted by forks or slings. It should only be a matter of time, however, before a pallet of self-contained rigidity emerges at a price comparable with the funded round-trip cost of a returnable wooden pallet.

Expendable Containers

Significant advances have been made recently in the design of expendable containers made of paper or doubleor triplewalled fibreboard. These are either self-contained units or "snoods" to contain and protect loads on flat pallets. They are of particular value for transits involving carriage by air, as the tare weights are low enough to attract the concessions for light air-freight containers introduced at the beginning of 1965, and the construction is strong enough to withstand handling in feeder road transport and in transhipment. Every one of 15 containers registered by shippers in a recent supplement to the IATA pallet and container register was of fibreboard construction.

Containers of this material, and even of paper, have been produced for bulk solids, although it is perhaps too early to pass judgment on them from the point of view of overall transport economy. For this type of traffic, and for liquids, more durable collapsible containers are alternatively available made of nylon fabric coated with plastic or synthetic rubber, and their widespread employment can be expected soon. One type recently developed is suitable for handling by crane, fork truck or pallet truck when loaded or collapsed, can be stacked when loaded or collapsed, and in the 'latter state occupies only 15 per cent of its filled volume.

Further possible refinements in the future could include the separation of the handling devices, so that these would be retained at terminal and transhipment points, thus leaving the travelling portion of the container as a large, re-usable sack of minimum weight and empty volume and considerably reduced cost. Whilst for solids the maximum size of these containers has, up to the present, been confined for technical reasons to a maximum of 75 Cu. ft., future developments will almost certainly include much larger containers with diameters extending to the full width of a road-vehicle platform and consequently improved area load factors.

If an efficient, general-purpose, expendable flat pallet is -eventually produced, pallet pools, which have the same objective of avoiding unladen transits, may well disappear. Apart from a small number of specialized pools, little in the way of pallet pooling has been achieved in this country, although the subject has recently been revived by one manufacturers' association and by the National Joint Council on Materials Handling.

Experience in other Countries indicates that pools based on hiring are unlikely to succeed—despite the sanguine outlook of at least one pallet manufacturer who, it is understood, would

a22 be prepared to underwrite such a scheme. On the other hand, a pool worked on the Continental "exchange" system would require considerable preparatory work here as the United Kingdom is without a powerful transport organization which could readily administer it. On the Continent this function is performed by the national railways, which use pallets domestically and have depots in all important places through which full and empty pallets are exchanged.

An essential feature of an "exchange" pool is that empty pallets are collected and delivered promptly after the corresponding deliveries and collections of loaded pallets, and that the journeys involved with the empties are short. British attempts to organize the return of empty pallets on the longdistance vehicles of public carriers have in the past generally proved unsatisfactory.

Continental Experience

Continental experience indicates that a single, national general-purpose pool is more likely to succeed than a number of specialized trade pools and that the pallets in such a pool should in turn be limited to a single size. Anyone considering the establishment of a British pool would therefore be well advised not to expend time in discussing alternative types and sizes of pallets as has been the ease with a number of abortive projects in the past, but to adopt the UIC 32 in. by 48 in. design and concentrate on the problems of administration.

Transport functions to meet demands, not to create them. Therefore, initial moves for the further modernization of distribution methods in line with those of production will in all probability come from users of transport rather than providers. although transport considerations must be taken into account. The benefits derived by the transporter from mechanical handling will in many cases be confined to those arising from accelerated turn-round at terminal points. Even these can be illusory if the lead mileage and other circumstances make it impracticable for the transport operator to make profitable use of the time saved.

Special-type road transport vehicles designed to dovetail into sophisticated loading and unloading schemes will have a part to play in the evolution of mechanical handling in transport but—as with specialized maritime container services—they will probably be confined to circumstances in which movement and handling throughout the transit, including both terminal areas, are under unified control. It is more than a coincidence that the most startling developments in mechanization involving special-purpose vehicles have been associated with vertical integration in industry, where the return on the capital invested can be calculated on a global basis.

One of the great attractions of road transport is its essential flexibility, and this is derived to a great extent from the employment of common-user vehicles adaptable to a wide variety of traffics. While, therefore, the general-purpose goods vehicle of the future will be made compatible with at least one form of mechanized loading, it will also remain suitable for consignments which are not susceptible to mechanical handling. Consequently, the unit load as a pallet or container can he expected to dominate materials handling in haulage as in other forms of transport.

This will still leave scope for considerable improvements in vehicle body design, particularly in methods of securing the load. Unless full-time use of a vehicle can be foreseen over a period of years on a special traffic, loading or securing devices which detract from the common-user function of a vehicle are to be avoided. This should not prevent the more general adoption of quick-release devices for securing containers by their bases which do not impinge on the vehicle loading platform; and arrangements for the safe transit of tiered pallets which are derived more from modern methods of strapping pallet loads of cartons by stabilizing the load with a minimum of strapping than from roping and sheeting.

Finally, an important condition for the successful progress of mechanical handling in road transport to the mutual benefit of users and transporteurs is a proper understanding of each other's problems and limitations. As a speaker at a recent ICHCA Conference pointed out in the context of handling in ports, there is still too great a tendency to seek to impose the techniques of one form of transport on adjacent functions, and vice versa.