Shop 25,000'+-, employees16-18, architectural, store fixtures, medical, schools -- CNC, beam saw, big bander, bore & insert, case clamp, hydraulic work benches, molder, shapers, sanders, widebelt, resaw, etc.

15 years ago: 140 carts, could never find an empty one, if you did it was on the opposite end of the shop and usually had something on it (My cart, hands off!) It seemed like a lot of wasted time moving empty carts back to the beginning of the manufacturing process.

I decided to try roller conveyors. It required rearranging equipment to get proper flow. When the idea was presented to the shop absolutely everyone said it wouldn't work.

So I bought 450' of used roller conveyor and had 5 transfer cars built. I'd seen the systems sold by the big machinery dealers but didn't like the very low height or the floor mounted guide tracks. Put our height @ 30", (24" high stack of 3/4" parts = 32 pc. and still easily handled & easy on the back.) Recessed guide tracks cut into the concrete floor (no tripping, easy sweeping.)

All of the (4' X 10') hydraulic assembly benches are served by paired 10' sections via one of the transfer cars. The benches are used for things that can't be case clamped. The molding/solid wood area still uses carts due to the lengths involved. The forklift rarely needs to go anywhere near the assembly areas.

If you ask the shop now, "would you want to go back to carts" .... the overwhelming answer is "never."

Before I made the commitment I did many scale model layouts. stretched strings over push pins. Put marks on the shop floors, considered the cost of moving equipment (electrical, ducts, air lines, vacuum system.)
Does it work for every project? NO! Could the design have been better? Maybe but it continues to work well.

Some equipment changes were considered in the original design. Many things about the building layout simply can't be changed but ways can be figured out to minimize the impact.
The move was completed in 3 days, over a weekend +1.

Has anyone else done something similar?

@ Larry

I installed a very similar system for high volume small square foot operation. We built the "trollys" using Creform, a very modular system allowing us to customize the trollys for our product. One main conveyor down the middle of two rows of 4 x 10 lift tables service by overhead air and electrical on retracts. materials came in via parts on conveyor left as cabinets on conveyor right to pack and ship. As long as the part kit was 100% complete the system worked well.

I thought it was a fundamental truth of the universe that cabinet shops never had enough carts.

We're four people, 7900 square feet, and we've got ten welded up carts for miscellaneous things, 34x48 (ish) Door parts, drawer parts, face frame parts, sometimes they get used for assembling things on the benches. Even just ferrying material from the back side of the widebelt back to the front side. I couldn't function with out carts. We could easily use a few more. It's a small shop in size and volume, so we go from no carts available to four five empty ones pretty quickly. There's nobody has one fulltime job at this point, we jump around so there's no consistent flow feeding benches.

We've got four carts I had a buddy make that are similar to the parts carts that Hafele sells for box parts coming off the router. I park them right outside the light fence and drop parts in. We haven't needed to do it yet, (our cnc has only been up and running a few months at this point), but on BIG jobs I plan on cutting parts sequentially and just filling them and cycling in the next set of empty carts. We have four, I wish I would've had him make six. I've only had one really big job come through since I got the cnc, and I didn't have those carts yet. That was a nightmare trying to keep things organized and not turn into a furball. I ended up shuffling a bunch of stuff around when I was done, that's not smart.

And we've got a whole mess of furniture carts for shooting cabinets over to the staging area.

A shop bigger than a garage stall with no carts sound like a giant pain in the rear to me. I don't know what the critical mass would be for square footage or personel to say "yeah, we need carts", but it can't be very big. Likewise, I don't know what the cutoff would be for putting in a conveyor system, but I'm nowhere near that point yet.

Carts are a necessary evil.

What we did is this.

We have the cnc router. It has a conveyer.

The bander, doweller and assembly area for strictly “boxes” are close so we can mitigate the transportation waste.

However, the bander has to have a large entry and exit to process countertops and other larger millworker items. Hence, carts.

Since the cnc cuts the larger millworker items like die walls, we obviously need to get that out of the box building area, hence carts.

When it comes down to the rubber hitting the road, we only process in small bites Sized jobs of 200 cabinets, 60 tops with corian and a Plam mix, are processed in lots of 10 or less +/- focussing on capacity completion in assembly and can it ship out.

There is no point in 50 carts or jobs cut sitting with an assembly back log. Getvthe cnc operator involved to band and bore, assembly or whatever and keep the machine cutting.

Look at your capacity constraints as follows.

Drafting.

Materials logistics.

Cutting.

Processing for assembly

Assembly.

QC.

Loading.

Installation.

Review of the job improvements

There is a myriad of other topics and concerns, but at the end of the day, carts are a necessary evil.

I’m sorry but a nurses die wall cannot be conveyorised. But the parts can be if small enough. So, therefore pin point your needs and cut the excess.