In this article, we dive deep into material handling. What it is. How it works. What technologies are involved. And 22 tried-and-true material handling tips you can implement in your warehouse today.
The ultimate guide for warehouse managers looking to improve the flow of materials across the floor.
Ready to dive in?
Let's get started with a review of the basics:
Material handling refers to the way materials and products are moved, stored, retrieved, and managed within your facility.
In a warehouse, specifically, that can include everything from unloading inbound pallets to storing inventory, transporting goods between zones, replenishing pick locations, and preparing orders for shipment.
It can help to think of material handling as the physical side of your warehouse performance.
Yes, your inventory systems can tell you what you have and where it should be. But material handling determines how easily your team can actually access it, move it, and ship it.
The other important note? Material handling can be manual, semi-automated, or highly automated.
A smaller operation may rely on shelving, carts, and forklifts.
A larger or more space-constrained facility may combine conveyors, software, and automated storage systems like a Vertical Lift Module (VLM) to reduce walking, improve storage density, and support faster picking.
No matter the size of your warehouse, material handling affects your productivity.
The important point is that material handling is not one single piece of equipment or one single strategy. It is the entire system behind how your goods flow through the building.
The short answer is: yes. How you handle your materials can have a direct impact on how well a warehouse runs day to day.
It influences speed, accuracy, space utilization, safety, and the amount of effort required to complete routine tasks. Even small inefficiencies in how goods are stored or moved can multiply quickly across thousands of picks, replenishments, and internal transfers.
A well-designed material handling process helps warehouses move their product with less friction. It can reduce unnecessary travel, support more consistent picking, and make it way easier to keep work moving during busy periods. It also helps warehouse teams do more with the people they already have by removing wasted motion and improving access to inventory.
Here are a few of the biggest reasons having a solid material handling strategy matters:
Every warehouse depends on flow.
Inventory has to move from one step to the next without creating backups or excessive handling. When material handling processes are designed well, your goods can move through receiving, putaway, storage, picking, packing, and shipping in a more predictable way.
This helps to reduce delays and keeps your orders moving.
Many warehouses run short on space before they run out of demand. And while you may blame your traditional racks and shelves, it could actually be due to your material handling strategy.
Poor material handling often shows up as overcrowded aisles, under-utilized vertical space, and clunky storage methods that do not match your inventory profile.
Better material handling improves utilization and can significantly delay or reduce the need for expansion.
If operators are walking long distances, backtracking between zones, or manually searching for items, the process is working harder than it should. Material handling improvements can reduce touches, shorten travel paths, and make inventory easier to access. That saves time and helps support more consistent throughput.
When storage locations are organized and movement is more controlled, it becomes easier to maintain inventory accuracy. Teams spend less time hunting for product, and picking workflows become easier to standardize. This is especially important for operations managing a wide range of SKUs, small parts, or fast-moving inventory.
Want the full checklist? Download our guide for a practical breakdown of 22 ways to improve warehouse flow, storage, inventory access, and day-to-day efficiency.
Material handling also affects how physically demanding warehouse work becomes. Reaching, bending, climbing, lifting, and transporting items over long distances all add strain. Better storage methods, improved presentation of goods, and more ergonomic access points can help create a safer and more sustainable work environment.
Material handling touches nearly every step in your warehouse operations. And while the exact workflow will vary by facility, most warehouses move inventory through the same core stages.
Understanding those stages makes it easier to spot where delays, extra touches, and space issues are creeping in.
So let's dive into how material handling works in each area of the warehouse:
Material handling starts the moment goods arrive at the building.
At receiving, teams unload inbound shipments, verify quantities, inspect items, and stage inventory for the next step.
When this area is disorganized, problems spread FAST.
Pallets stack up. Product waits too long to be processed. And this all leads to your downstream teams losing time as they deal with avoidable confusion.
A strong receiving process keeps goods moving instead of letting them sit. Clear staging zones, labeled locations, and consistent handling rules help teams process inbound inventory faster and reduce the risk of errors from the start.
Once your inventory is received, it needs to be placed in the right storage location. This is where material handling and storage strategy come together.
If putaway is inconsistent, operators spend more time searching later, travel paths get longer, and available space is often used poorly.
Good putaway practices match the storage method to the item profile. For example, your fast movers should be easier to access. Small parts may need bins or automated storage. But bulky or slow-moving items may belong in a different area entirely. The goal is not just to store your inventory. The goal is to store it in a way that supports efficient retrieval for your teams.
In many operations, inventory is stored in one location and picked from another.
That creates the need for replenishment, which is the movement of product from reserve storage into active pick locations.
If your replenishment is poorly timed or poorly managed, pickers run into empty locations, and work slows down.
A better material handling strategy makes your replenishment more predictable. It reduces emergency moves, supports smoother picking, and helps balance labor across the day instead of forcing constant reaction.
Picking is one of the most labor-intensive stages in the warehouse, which makes it one of the most important areas for material handling improvement.
Travel time, item access, slotting logic, and presentation of goods all affect how quickly and accurately orders can be picked.
In many facilities, picking inefficiency shows up as too much walking, repeated searching, or awkward item retrieval.
This is often where better layout decisions, improved storage methods, or goods-to-person automation can make a measurable difference.
After items are picked, they move into packing and shipping.
Material handling still plays a major role here. Orders need to arrive at the right station in the right sequence, packing supplies need to be accessible, and completed shipments need a clear path to outbound staging.
If packing and shipping areas are crowded or disconnected from picking flow, the warehouse can create a new bottleneck at the very end of the process. A smoother handoff between picking, packing, and outbound staging helps maintain throughput and reduce last-minute congestion.
Returns are often treated as a separate process, but remember, they are still part of the material handling system.
Returned items must be inspected, sorted, restocked, quarantined, or routed elsewhere. If that process is unclear, your inventory accuracy can suffer and usable product can sit idle much longer than it should.
A well-designed returns process supports faster disposition decisions and gets inventory back into the right flow with less handling.
Now that you understand some of the stages and areas of material handling, let's dive deeper into the types of equipment that support your strategy.
Material handling includes much more than forklifts and pallet racks. Most warehouses use a mix of equipment types, each serving a different purpose in the movement, storage, and retrieval of goods. The right combination depends on inventory profile, order volume, space constraints, and workflow goals.
This category includes all of the systems used to hold your inventory between touches.
Common examples include pallet rack, shelving, bins, drawers, and mezzanines.
These storage tools help to organize your goods and make them accessible to your team. But their effectiveness really depends on how well they match the items being stored.
For example, a pallet rack may work well for reserve storage, sure. But your small parts will most likely need more structured organization.
If the storage method does not fit the inventory, teams usually pay for it later through slower picking, wasted space, or poor visibility. It may be worth a re-evaluation if you spend precious minutes - or even hours - trying to hunt down product you KNOW you have... somewhere...
Transport equipment does exactly what it sounds like. It moves goods from one area of your warehouse to another.
This includes pallet jacks, carts, forklifts, conveyors, and similar tools. Technically, your people are also material handlers!
In many warehouses, transport is where a large amount of labor time gets consumed. This is especially true when your operators are covering long distances or moving the same product multiple times.
The more efficient the transport path, the less wasted motion your warehouse carries throughout the day. That is why many material handling improvements focus on shortening travel distances and reducing unnecessary internal movement.
Bending? Reaching? Back aching?
Some material handling equipment is designed to present goods at a better height or position for the operator.
These are tools like: lift tables, hoists, tilt devices, and ergonomic workstations.
These tools may not always get the same attention as storage or transport equipment, but they can make a HUGE difference in safety and day-to-day ease of work.
When your inventory is easier to reach and handle, your team can work faster with less physical strain. That matters in operations where repetitive motion, bending, stretching, or lifting are common.
Automated material handling systems are used when manual methods start creating space, speed, or accuracy limitations.
These systems can include conveyors, Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), put walls, and automated storage and retrieval systems.
For example, a Vertical Lift Module (VLM) can help store small parts in a much smaller footprint while presenting trays to the operator at an ergonomic access point. A Vertical Carousel Module (VCM) can support fast retrieval in certain applications. Robotic cube storage, like AutoStore, can be perfect for warehouses that need to process more orders in a smaller footprint.
Think you're too small to benefit from something like automated storage? Think again. In a survey of Kardex Remstar customers, 56% ran their warehouse with just 24 people or less.
Read about the benefits of VLMs for small warehouses here.
Inventory Management Software is often overlooked. But it's an important material handling player. It helps control where items are stored, how they are retrieved, and how inventory movements are tracked across the process.
The key is to view warehouse automation as part of your larger material handling strategy.
The best results usually come when automation is applied to a clear workflow problem, not added just for the sake of adding equipment.
Most material handling problems do not show up all at once.
They build gradually through small inefficiencies that become normal over time. We're talking about: a few extra steps here... a little more congestion there... until eventually your warehouse is working much harder than it should to get the same results.
If any of the signs below sound familiar, it could be time to review how materials move through the operation to find where your biggest friction points are.
Getting your steps in? That's great. But not for teams that are already strapped for labor, pulling weekend shifts, and shelling out for overtime.
When your operators are spending a large part of their day traveling between storage areas, pick faces, packing stations, and staging zones, productivity drops so quickly.
Excess walking is a huge red flag. And it often points to poor slotting, long travel paths, or workflows that force people to move back and forth across the building.
This is one of the clearest signs that your material handling strategy can be improved.
In many cases, you can simply make better layout decisions or changes to your storage strategy to reduce travel time without adding too much complexity to your existing process.
Aisle congestion is more than an inconvenience.
It slows work, creates a huge safety risk, and makes it harder for your people and equipment to move consistently through the facility.
Cross-traffic between picking, replenishment, receiving, and forklift activity is often a sign that the warehouse layout is not appropriately supporting the flow of work.
When too many tasks are competing for the same space, even simple moves take longer.
This can usually be solved with clearer zoning and better traffic planning to often relieve pressure on busy aisles.
If picking takes longer than expected, or your picking accuracy is slipping, the root cause is not always your labor performance.
While it's easy to blame human error, and that can play a role, your materials handling strategy is often to blame as well. Your inventory may be stored in the wrong locations. Your pick paths may be inefficient. Your operators may be dealing with hard-to-read labels, cluttered storage, or too many manual workarounds.
Material handling has a direct effect on how easy it is to pick accurately.
When inventory is organized well and presented clearly, teams can move faster with fewer mistakes.
Many warehouses run out of usable space long before they run out of square footage.
Empty air above shelving, oversized storage for small items, and mixed organization methods can all lead to poor space utilization.
If storage locations are not matched to the size, velocity, and handling needs of each SKU, the warehouse ends up carrying unnecessary inefficiency. Better slotting and denser storage methods can help recover capacity and improve access at the same time.
Remember that expansions, off-site storage, and the addition of more traditional, clunky shelves only make your material handling problem worse.
We've said it before, and we'll say it again. When your team spends a good chunk of their day searching for parts, verifying locations manually, or working around inconsistent storage habits, your material handling strategy is the problem.
This issue is super common in facilities with high SKU counts, small parts, shared storage areas, or legacy location systems that are no longer keeping pace with demand.
Is your team having to really stretch to reach things?
If so, it may be time for a change. Your operators shouldn't have to climb, stretch, bend repeatedly, or work around blocked aisles just to complete routine tasks.
When those conditions become common, the warehouse is likely to depend on storage and handling methods that no longer fit the workflow.
A better material handling strategy can improve ergonomics by bringing items to a better access height. This can reduce your team's reliance on ladders and help reduce heavy lifting and excessive reaching.
A process that worked well at one stage of the business may start to strain as order volume grows, SKU counts expand, or service expectations increase.
What used to feel manageable can become a daily bottleneck.
This is often the point where warehouses begin rethinking their storage methods, replenishment strategy, or where automation could support better flow.
Growth does not always require a complete redesign, but it usually does require a more intentional material handling strategy.
Improving material handling does not always require a major redesign. In many cases, the biggest gains come from practical changes that make inventory easier to access, reduce wasted motion, and create better flow across the warehouse.
That is why we put together a guide with 22 material handling tips warehouse teams can use to evaluate their current operation and identify improvement opportunities.
The tips are organized around the areas that tend to have the biggest impact on daily performance:
Inside the guide, readers will find practical ideas such as reducing backtracking, organizing inventory more logically, clearing travel paths, improving signage, reviewing storage capacity, and creating a cleaner, safer workspace for operators.
The goal is not to overhaul everything at once. It is to help teams find realistic ways to improve how materials move through the facility, one step at a time.
Want the full checklist? Download our guide for a practical breakdown of 22 ways to improve warehouse flow, storage, inventory access, and day-to-day efficiency.