Conveying & Sortation

Free rollers on a slope · no power

The cheapest metre of conveyor there is. Ideal for a short fall between two fixed points.

Also called: motorised roller, MDR, live roller

Zoned drive · accumulating

Zone control lets cartons queue without touching, which is what makes accumulation possible.

Flat or troughed belt

Small, light, loose or bagged goods a roller would drop between rollers.

Interlocking plastic modules · washdown

Food and wet processing, and any curve a flat belt cannot take.

Heavy loads, pallets, hot goods

Pallet handling and process lines where a belt would not survive.

Also called: skate wheel expandable, flexi conveyor

Extends and curves · gravity or powered

Container loading and unloading, then folded away. The workhorse of a seasonal dock.

Extends into the trailer or container

Cuts the walk inside a container to nothing. Standard where dock throughput is the constraint.

Also called: trolley conveyor, GOH conveyor

Rail-mounted carriers

Garments on hangers, painted parts, and anything better kept off the floor.

Bulk powder and granule transfer

Process rather than warehouse handling.

Continuous helical rise or fall

Highest throughput between levels because nothing indexes or stops.

Also called: VRC, continuous vertical lift

Carton, tote or pallet lift

Cheaper than a spiral, lower throughput, much smaller footprint.

Cleated or high-grip belt

Grade limited by the product's coefficient of friction, not by the motor.

90° transfers and free rotation

Changes direction in the footprint of a single unit.

Combining and splitting lines

Where two flows become one, or one becomes many. The design pinch point of nearly every system.

Zero-pressure or minimum-pressure

Buffers downstream stoppages so the whole line does not halt with them.

Spiral or straight gravity chute

The cheapest way down, still used at the end of most sortation systems.

5,000–12,000 units/hr · gentle side transfer

High rate on cartons of mixed size. The e-commerce default.

10,000+ units/hr · many destinations

Small, mixed and fragile items with a very high chute count. Parcel and fashion.

Tips the carrier into a chute

Robust with irregular items; harder on fragile ones.

Lower rate · lower cost

Where destinations are few and the rate is moderate.

Simple mechanical divert

The most economical sortation, at the cost of gentler handling.

Also called: DWS, dimension-weigh-scan

Multi-side scanning with weight and cube capture

The data upstream of the sorter. Without it the sorter has nothing to act on.

Take-away chutes, bagging stations, putwalls

The steelwork at the sorter's outfeed. This part we build.

Also called: AGV

Follows a fixed path — tape, wire or magnet

Repetitive fixed routes. Cheap and reliable; changing the route means changing the floor.

Also called: AMR

Maps and navigates dynamically

Routes change in software. Needs floor markings, network coverage and aisle discipline.

Also called: shelf-carrying robot, rack-moving AMR

Brings the shelf pod to the picker

Removes picker travel entirely. Needs racking built to tighter tolerances than a conventional job.

Layer or unit picking arm

End-of-line palletising at rates and consistency manual stacking cannot hold across a shift.

Vision-guided arm with suction or gripper

Still SKU-dependent. Works well on regular packaged goods, less so on soft or reflective ones.

Also called: ATLS

Loads a full trailer in a single move

High-volume fixed lanes only.