Industrial Automation Magazine India

Conventional MHEs are much better suited and practical

Published on : Sunday 01-11-2020

Tushar Mehendale, Managing Director, ElectroMech.

From manufacturing plants to retail stores, how important is material handling to the economy of a country?
Put simplistically, material handling is the basic underlying process of every physical transaction. So we like to joke that it is a ‘necessary evil’ because although it doesn't really add any value to the product, but still is required nonetheless.

The manufacturing industry is still heavily reliant on conventional MHE even as automated options are available. What are the impediments in modernisation?
Conventional MHEs and fully automated MHEs have their own individual niches that they occupy depending on the productivity output required and the variety to be handled. For simplistic tasks that are not highly repetitive or where a lot of variety is involved, conventional MHEs are much better suited and practical. For jobs that involved high volumes of repetitive movements in relatively shorter amounts of times, automation would be the way to go. There is always a cost-benefit tradeoff in deciding between conventional vs. automated. Modernisation does not necessarily always mean that its automation. There is a lot of scope for modernisation in the traditional manually operated material handling equipment, e.g., operator assist features, safety cut-offs, warning systems, etc.

Are adequate safety features embedded in material handling equipment?
A responsible manufacturer always needs to ensure that the equipment that is put into the marketplace has all the necessary safety features that the customer has asked for in addition to basic safety features that are inherent in the design and manufacturing of the equipment.

How are the emerging technologies like IoT, Lights, Voice, etc., are changing the warehousing landscape?
There is a definite movement happening towards Industry 4.0 in the warehousing space and ‘dark warehouses’ are becoming reality.

Tushar Mehendale, as the Managing Director of the ElectroMech Group, is responsible for transforming a small crane manufacturing workshop into a full-fledged multi-national industrial cranes company that is currently the largest in India and amongst the top 10 in Asia. ElectroMech under its group has the flagship ElectroMech Material Handling Systems (I) Pvt Ltd, which specialises in designing, selling, manufacturing and commissioning a whole host of industrial overhead cranes that are used across a wide spectrum of industries.