All good materials handling designers have a few tricks up their sleeves. These are the solutions that solve sticky problems, create efficiencies, save money, or promote greater throughputs.

Sometimes they are simple ideas that no one else ever considered before. Other times they are thoughts that can spark distribution revolutions.

We contacted four materials handling designers and consultants and asked them to share their best ideas with MMH readers.

Many of the ideas they provided can be adapted easily to your current DC operations with little or no investment. Others are better for you to consider when you build your next facility. Either way, there is plenty of food for thought here.

Our thanks to Jim Apple of The Progress Group, Louis Serny of Sedlak Management Consultants, John Yacka of Gross & Associates and Steve Trommer of Trommer & Associates for sharing the expertise gained from their many years in materials handling, and also for gathering additional great ideas from members of their own design staffs.

Hopefully, these thoughts will spark some good ideas of your own.

1. Know the ultimate disposition of a return before you touch it. Maybe you can handle it only once.

2. Install mezzanines over shipping and receiving docks to make use of vertical space that often goes empty.

3. Use rack structures to support a branch of a conveyor system in lieu of using the ceiling or floor for support.

4. Create a holding area for shipped goods that is accessible to trucks during off-hours, but does not provide access to the warehouse itself. This allows for trucks to come and load when the warehouse is not in operation. This is also useful when you have to ship a large quantity in a short amount of time and can also help to stagger shipping to off-hours without requiring a warehouse staff.

5. Make use of unused run-out space at the end of high-bay aisles. If trucks do not need this space for turn around, consider installing shelving along the wall line. The shelves can be easily accessed by order pickers operating perpendicular to the high-bay racks.

6. Vary zone boundaries from batch to batch to provide equal workload for each picker based on picks needed, instead of an equal pick face based on SKU quantity or space.

7. Use consolidation carousels to accumulate multiple tote orders. This eliminates the need for additional accumulation for staging as well as manual sortation at packing.

8. Observe the best operators to discover process tricks. They have spent a career perfecting them.

9. Paint lines on exterior walls and pavement to help over-the-road drivers with backing up.

10. If uneven terrain is making construction of a new distribution center challenging, consider placing your shipping or receiving dock on a mezzanine level, but even with the higher ground outside. The main floor can then be level with the lower terrain. Inbound and outbound conveyor can take product to and from the warehouse floor from the docks.

11. Review picking locations every 4-6 months to assure that the inventory is located in the most effective type of picking fixture, such as shelving or carton flow rack. Relocate as appropriate. Consider the use of slotting software to assist in this process.

12. Install high bay lights with 'pig tail' cords which not only makes them easy to move and replace, but may also be considered modular equipment and written off as depreciation in less time than the building structure.

13. Avoid containers and cartons that weigh between 40 and 100 pounds. Operators will try to handle them alone when they should not.

14. If your facility lacks ceiling height for powered storage units, consider going down. Additional height can be gained by placing the bottom level of powered storage below the facility's floor level and designing the shuttles to extract and bring products back up to floor level.

15. When process concepting, treat single-line orders as a separate class apart from orders that contain multiple lines. Efficiencies can be gained by picking and packing these independently.

16. Allow sufficient space above and around pallets for picking cases without excessive reaching and bending.

17. Try to plan workplaces to eliminate 180-degree turns. This will reduce worker effort and the risk of injury.

18. Eliminate headaches associated with active location replenishments which exceed cubic capacity by creating a 'hot pick' area as a relief-valve. This applies to unexpected surges in SKU demand, especially pre-season, and also can be an indicator to identify a new profiling action.

19. Minimize the noise level in a conveyor system by utilizing electronic accumulation instead of mechanical. Also consider plastic isolators between the frame and shaft.

20. Combine value-added tasks with other necessary process steps. This reduces the handling required in sending items to a separate value-added processing area.

21. Design carts that are easy and fast to handle to minimize congestion and create a sense of speed.

22. Consider using aluminum pick carts, which are lightweight, durable and strong.

23. Flat slip sheet pallets can be returned to the beginning of a processing line on edge. Simply tilt the sheet sideways and place into a thin high-walled skate-wheel conveyor that uses gravity to deliver the slip sheet efficiently back to the line start while saving floor space.

24. Within your pallet racks, align your top beam flush will the top of the upright. This will allow for storage of oversized items at the top level of back-to-back pallet rack.

25. De-trash upon receipt at dedicated stations by removing items that are typically piece-picked out of their cartons and placing them into totes. The totes can then be inserted directly into a flow rack or shelf. De-trashing allows you to keep trash out of your pick module, reduce or eliminate the need for trash conveyor, and give you better inventory tracking.

26. Many pick modules feature a middle takeaway conveyor with a trash conveyor overhead. Consider constructing shelves under the trash conveyor to gain additional pick slots for fast pick items.

27. Eliminate the need to maintain an active pick location for every SKU in the distribution center by introducing dynamic active pick location assignments for slow or out-of-season products. This also pertains to those occasions when orders for product, which normally moves in full case quantities, require less than full case demand.

28. For processing efficiency, break partial shipping orders into individual shipping cartons and handle them independently, rather than waiting for all items to accumulate.

29. Batch pick multiple orders from high levels of storage using a platform or cart with slots for totes that is placed directly on the platform of a man-up orderpicker. Picks can be made directly into the slots as the cart rises and drops with the picker. Wheels can be added to the cart, so that when picks are completed, the entire cart can be wheeled easily to consolidation or packing.

30. Create shelf bin locations on the floor level of back-to-back single deep pallet racks. There is enough space under a 96-inch pallet rack module to accommodate a three-foot working aisle with 30 inch deep shelving on each side.

31. Conduct a 'lights out' test of your facility at least twice a year to assure that the emergency lights are working properly and that there are enough lights in the right places to assure safe exit from the work areas.

32. Use a sliding pick shelf mounted directly to the pick face for greater efficiency. Attach a radio frequency device and scale to allow for weigh checking during picking. The pick shelf, mounted on rails, slides along with the work and reduces the quantity of conveyor required for picking and takeaway.

33. When batch order picking, use large characters on labels to make sorting-by-order easier.

34. Design workstations first, then the handling systems.

35. Create a sort trailer at your receiving dock doors. This will allow you to unload multiple trailers out of one door without consuming space within the facility.

36. Pick the small items first and the big ones when it is time to load.

37. Select and design containers and carts to match the processing required and the products they will contain.

38. Design circular handling systems that permit routing from any location to another.

39. Store work-in-process in its highest density, least vulnerable state  that is before welding or before painting. Make paint the first step of assembly, not the last step of fabrication.

40. Add a radio frequency PCMCIA card to a laptop to provide a full screen of information to mobile workers on the floor, such as pickers who'd like to preview an entire order, or view a list of special instructions. This can be mounted with a power source on a picking cart to provide online, full screen information as if the worker were using a desktop PC.

41. Feed assembly lines in the smallest reasonable container sizes to facilitate line changeover and to reduce the size of the workplace.

42. Use polybags and picking labels to identify loose pieces. It makes the receiving job much easier.

43. Use operators as members of the workplace design team. They have practical experience that can be extremely valuable in designing efficiencies.

44. Let primary flows bypass safety stock to reduce handling steps and distances.

45. Slot products to match natural order characteristics, such as by catalog or brochure, by gender, by product family, or style.

46. Design pallet rack with larger openings near the top and smaller openings near the bottom. Doing so can reduce the structural requirements of the uprights and save money.

47. Install shelving over pick-and-pass conveyor lines to provide space for additional pick faces or supplies.

48. Air condition your DC to obtain a competitive advantage in hiring and retaining the 'cream of the crop' workforce. Providing a more comfortable working environment should result in higher productivity and quality, too.

49. As an alternative to costly air conditioning, use fans positioned throughout a 3-level pick module to create uniform airflow.

50. Institute a vendor compliance program defining requirements for labeling and packaging of incoming items. This can increase your throughput and accuracy. Functions such as receiving, quality control, and even labor planning can benefit. Correct box sizes and label positioning also helps reduce the chance of mis-scans on sortation equipment.