From Manual Picking to a Full Conveyor System — Inside a 100-Year-Old Building

Manual picking is an excellent, cost-effective way to move small volumes around a distribution center. It scales terribly. This customer was hand-pulling every carton from static racks and pallets and manually moving product to their tobacco stamping stations. After stamping, cartons were hand-packed into cases and pushed down a single piece of conveyor to be sent to another floor. There was no room to grow.

We designed and installed a full MDR and belt conveyor system built around the way they actually operate, not an idealized version of it.

Cases are now pulled directly from flow racks onto the belt conveyor for routing to the stamping stations. Individual cartons are stamped and sent from the stamping area to the packing line, where a packer picks them off the conveyor and places them into the correct customer order. Finished orders travel from an MDR pick station, down a decline, through a 90 degree merge and ride a decline conveyor down to the second floor for staging and shipping.

The building is over 100 years old. That means original hardwood floors, exposed brick walls, and structural columns every 15 feet. Every conveyor run had to work around what was already there, not a clean floor plan drawn for automation.

That kind of constraint changes how you design. You can’t route where you want to. You have to route where you can, then make it work. Every section required a specific length, specific supports, and specific elevation to clear what was in the way while still connecting to the next run cleanly.

This is the part of the work that keeps us interested. The system has to fit the building, fit the operation, and still be something that operators can actually use and technicians can troubleshoot when something goes wrong. That’s the standard not just making it run on day one.

The customer went from hand-carrying every carton through the operation to a system that routes product end-to-end across two floors. That’s a meaningful shift for a facility that didn’t have room to grow before.