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3 Ways Food Service Distributors Can Streamline Backdoor Deliveries

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Backdoor deliveries to restaurants, institutional kitchens, convenience stores, and other food service environments pose unique challenges. These challenges can change from one delivery to the next. Delivery drivers may encounter hard-to-access entryways, obstructed receiving areas, wet floors, and overcrowded backrooms. These hazards are disruptive and can slow down delivery personnel. However, key strategies and tools can help distributors overcome these challenges. This can include prioritizing load stability with space-appropriate dolly carts . Here are a few strategies food service distributors can use to streamline backdoor deliveries. Prepare to Enter a New Operating Environment with Every Stop Every restaurant, kitchen, and convenience store environment will be different. It’s useful to go into every delivery mentally and practically prepared. Consider everything from entryways and receiving areas to ramps, doors, stairs, and floors, and even the receiving time f...
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3 Ways Material Handling Equipment Helps Uniform Delivery Teams

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Laundry and linen routes place high demands on your employees. Delivering uniforms means not just handling the load weight but also countless repeated movements throughout the day. Constant starts, stops, and turns through service areas take their toll. Using material handling equipment, such as classic hand trucks , can make these tasks easier for your employees while maintaining or even improving efficiency. Improve Efficiency While Reducing Strain When your employees use material handling equipment, they move more smoothly with better balance and cleaner route performance. It’s much easier to stack boxes of clean laundry on a hand truck and wheel them to their destination than to carry them by hand. If a box or bag of laundry won’t fit on a traditional hand truck, you might need to upgrade to a heavy duty hand truck trolley . It is designed to support heavier, bulkier loads. The heavy duty hand truck can also tackle other tasks for your employees, such as moving washers...
Location: United States
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How 3PL Teams Keep Up with Mixed Customer Requirements

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Third-party logistics teams often have a diverse client portfolio. One might require a motorized hand truck to move their items, while another could just need a lightweight dolly. Standardizing tools improves efficiency and productivity. The trick is to do so without oversimplifying the work. From training out inconsistent habits to standardizing non-negotiables, here are a few tips to help. Different Clients Have Different Needs Every client is different. Your team might need to move only a few small boxes for one client, but furniture and appliances for the next. Inconsistency is often a process problem, not a labor problem, so there should be a process that dictates which material handling tools go with which clients. A collapsible and lightweight hand cart can be tucked into a delivery van, whereas more specialized equipment may require different storage. For example, a motorized hand truck requires a powered liftgate for deliveries. Required tools and steps shoul...
Location: United States
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How Can Rental Businesses Improve Efficiency?

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Rental businesses are always looking for ways to reduce rehandling time during returns, staging, and loadouts. Whether you need to make your loads more uniform and standardized or make it easier for customers to find or return their rented powered hand truck , there are a few ways your rental business can improve control, consistency, and team efficiency between jobs. Here are a few things to consider. Start by Reducing Turnaround Problems Incoming and outgoing equipment will place different demands on your team. Outgoing equipment needs to be inspected and ready to go, while returns need to be processed, maintained, and returned to their spot. The problem arises when you have too much internal movement, which can slow scheduling and turnaround times. How much time does it take to inspect and move a convertible hand truck dolly back to its rental spot? Did the pressure washer come back with all of its nozzle tips? How long does it take to move items between yards? The a...
Location: United States
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Need a Custom Hand Truck? Magline Makes It Easy

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If you regularly use a standard hand truck, chances are there are ways you’d like to improve it. Whether it’s wheels that won’t destroy a client’s carpet or handles that are more ergonomic, it’s easy to customize nearly every part of a Magliner hand truck. From the classic to the collapsible hand truck, you can find customizations or add-on options for most Magliner material handling tools. Design Your Own Magliner at https://www.magliner.com/ Contact Magliner at 866-329-4737 Choosing the Right Wheels Wheels can make a major difference for hand trucks during deliveries or while moving items around a warehouse. Pneumatic tires offer excellent load protection and shock absorption and perform well on uneven surfaces, such as gravel. Microcellular wheels are long-lasting and don’t need air, so they can never go flat. Mold-on rubber wheels are lightweight, durable, and ideal for paved surfaces. Solid rubber and microcellular wheels are perfect for white-glove deliveries or profess...
Location: United States
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How Can You Make Trade Show Setup Easier?

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Trade show setup can take hours of toiling under convention center lights as your team unpacks, moves items, and gets the floorplan right. There are some ways to make this easier, including assigning who will move items with the heavy duty hand truck and pre-planning the setup. Here are a few tips to make the logistics of setting up a trade show booth easier. Pre-Planning Is a Must Pre-show prep is a key strategy for more efficient setup processes. Before heading to the trade show, be sure to shop hand truck carts online, so your team is equipped to efficiently move pieces of the display. Create a checklist detailing all booth components, tools, and marketing materials, along with their locations. As boxes are wheeled in on hand trucks, check them off the list. Assembling the structure should be the first step, with backdrops, frames, and lighting coming before smaller items and product placement. A heavy duty hand truck or motorized hand truck can help your team easily move e...
Location: United States
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How Can Material Handling Tools Support Employee Productivity?

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As your employees go about their tasks during the day, they tend to slow down toward the end as their energy is expended. Harder tasks, like moving boxes by hand, are tiring and inefficient. If you want to boost all-day productivity, you can get versatile hand truck and carts to help your employees get more done in less time while using less energy. Here are a few ways the right material handling tools help. Support All-Day Energy Levels Moving items one by one takes up time and energy. No matter how heavy the boxes are, if your employees need to move supplies, products, or a client’s personal items, it has to be done. With a classic hand truck, your employees can make these tasks much easier. Stack the boxes on the dolly and wheel it into place. High-quality hand trucks with a 500-pound weight capacity are valuable in the moving, logistics, and delivery space, and can help your team maintain energy levels from morning to night. Avoid Team Lifts and Free Up Employees Te...
Location: United States
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