Innovative ways needed to handle non-conveyable inventory

Due to an increase in e-commerce sales, warehouses are handling much larger volumes of large, heavy and irregularly shaped items known as non-conveyable inventory. These are more difficult to handle compared to regular inventory.

Furniture manufacturers are used to handling heavy and irregularly shaped items such as couches, beds and tables. Specialised furniture trolleys, sofa racks and other equipment are used to store and move large items.

In non-furniture warehouses, non-conveyable items used to account for around 5% of orders, but this proportion is increasing. Rather than handle these exceptions manually as in the past, warehouses now want systems that can automatically handle a wider range of item sizes and shapes.

The challenge is not confined to the picking and packing process. A truck loaded with mixed packages of different sizes and weights is more difficult and takes longer to unload.

There is also an issue with modifying older warehouse buildings that were built to house traditional material handling equipment designed to process only items in flat boxes. It is a challenge to adapt these buildings for more complex handling equipment.

Sortation automation equipment often separates non-conveyable items and sends them to an area where they can be manually handled. Equipment manufacturers are researching ways to automate the packing and dispatch of non-conveyable items.

Though the number of non-conveyable items is small in many warehouses, the cost of processing them is much higher than standard packages, as it is mainly done by hand rather than automated equipment.

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