Materials handling: New concepts for established equipment

What's new in materials handling? While there appears to be nothing startlingly revolutionary about the equipment in use the “whole system” approach has been developed to produce a finely integrated scheme to ensure efficiency and cost‐effectiveness. This was a jumping‐off point for Geoffrey Butcher's paper given at a recent conference organised by the Institute of Purchasing and Supply, and he continues with a look at the equipment designed to meet this criteria.