A large manufacturer of heavy-duty transmissions placed its components for machining on industrial carts staged line side opposite the machining centers. This allowed the operators to easily retrieve their next batch of parts and manually push them into their work stations.
However, the carts were loaded and empty dunnage retrieved by fork trucks. This created an unsafe situation for machinists, who were often standing in the narrow aisles where fork truck operators were maneuvering the loads.
Material Handling Solution
A much safer, streamlined material handling solution known as a “mother/daughter” (M/D) industrial cart was proposed. The M/D industrial cart is essentially two small carts within a larger cart. Bulk parts were fork truck loaded onto the two small daughter carts (while in the mother frame) in the market area. 
One or two complete M/D frames were towed to line-side positions and “dropped” for use by the machinists. Full daughter carts were manually rolled out of the frame and empties pushed back in. The large mother industrial cart can be towed in both directions, allowing the tug to handle “dead end” aisles by simply connecting to the other end and towing.
The M/D solution eliminated the safety issues associated with fork truck loading/unloading of dunnage on carts within tight aisles and improved delivery efficiency by carrying more material per run.
Tags: customized industrial carts, industrial carts, towable industrial carts
