Industrial Automation, Ergonomics and Material Handling

Material handling is at the heart of any industrial site, whether it involves people moving boxes, conveyors moving gravel, cranes lifting heavy material, pipes moving water, monorails transporting loads, or cobots tending to a machine. By focusing on automation and ergonomics, we create designs that support the safe, effective, and efficient movement of material of all shapes, types, and sizes.

We can help you deploy automation in specific areas based on things like material weight, types and ranges of motion, and kinds of tasks. This improves worker productivity and safety. For example, when dirty or repetitive jobs (like packaging, palletizing, and mounting) can be automated, your employees are free to complete other jobs and repetitive motion syndrome is reduced.

Whether your project involves a new plant, a retrofit, or upgrades to existing facilities, our decades of experience ensure that you get the automation, ergonomics, and material handling solutions you need to keep things running smoothly.

We can help you identify the approach to automated material handling that will work best for your application, designing a system that works well even within the confines of an existing space. We’ll make sure material-handling solutions are implemented safely and effectively – and that your facility can support them – whether that involves reinforcing a roof for a new bridge train or putting in new footings for equipment stands.

In situations where it makes sense for people to be doing the work vs. an automated process or machine, Shive-Hattery can create an ergonomic work environment that promotes safety and productivity while supporting fast, error-free assembly. By minimizing forceful and/or repetitive motions and analyzing requirements for different types of work, we’ll help you reduce jobsite hazards through design.