Choice of Materials Handling Equipment

Abstract

When a particular product is being manufactured or processed, certain limits of material and quality are imposed. It is likely that wherever this particular product is being made geographically, at any point in the world, similar conditions of material and quality will prevail. In many cases the machinery of manufacture will be of similar characteristics; indeed, in some industries the machinery of production will be virtually identical, there being perhaps only one or two manufacturers of specific machines on a world scale. All metal-working industries, for example, will be equipped with machine tools having virtually identical functions: lathes, presses, forging machines, grinders, millers, etc. The spread of technology and technical information is so rapid today that innovations can be accepted at a much faster rate than would have been thought possible fifty years ago. It is difficult to imagine a portable radio being constructed anywhere in the world today which did not make use of transistorised circuitry, and the use of new integrated circuit devices is separated by months rather than years even in countries not generally recognised as world producers.