This was the largest single conveyor install we have delivered. Ten months on site, a peak crew of thirty, and a contract worth two and a half million dollars. Most of it went in overhead.
The client runs a national retail group. The integrator held the equipment package and we held the installation. Our scope ran across belted conveyor, live roller, accumulation, gravity, a sliding shoe sorter, and extendable units at the dock. Six equipment types, one building, one schedule.
Hanging the line from the roof
A large share of this system is ceiling hung. That single decision changes the whole job. Floor supported conveyor is straightforward. You set a leg, you shim it, you move on. Hung conveyor moves the load into the building structure, which means every drop has to land on steel that can take it, and the roof does not care where the drawing says the conveyor goes.
So the survey came first. We worked off the real building rather than the model, found where the joists actually sat, and set the drop points to suit. Some sections needed transfer steel added before a single hanger went in. That work is invisible in a photo and it is most of the reason the line runs true.
Working overhead also slows the pace on purpose. Crews are on lifts, tools are tethered, and the floor below has to stay clear. We staged the building in zones so that other trades could keep working in one area while we were in the air in another.
Six equipment types, one rhythm
Belted conveyor carries product. Live roller moves cartons under power. Accumulation lets product queue without crushing itself. Gravity costs almost nothing to run and does a lot of quiet work at the ends of a line. The sliding shoe sorter is the piece that decides where a carton goes, and it is the least forgiving item in the building to install.
A sorter has to be flat and square along its whole length. If it is not, it will still run. It will just start pushing cartons to the wrong lane weeks after everyone has gone home. We set ours with laser levels and checked it more than once, because the cost of getting that wrong is not a repair bill. It is a sort error rate that nobody can trace back to the day it was built.
At the dock we installed extendable conveyor. Those units reach into a trailer so that nobody has to walk boxes down forty feet of steel deck. They earn their keep on day one.
The part that took ten months
People assume a long schedule means a slow crew. On this job it meant a live building and a phased handover. Sections went in, got tested, and got turned over while we were still installing elsewhere. That is harder than a clean building. Every zone has a boundary, and every boundary needs guarding, signage, and a plan for what happens when someone walks through it anyway.
Winter ran through the middle of it. Deliveries land late, steel comes in cold, and the yard turns into the constraint. We planned for that instead of arguing with it.
The result the client gave us
The client had a wider program running across many sites. By the time ours was finished, seventeen installations had been completed within that program. They told us ours was the benchmark for execution quality and efficiency.
They also called out the speed and the accuracy of how our crew worked. We are usually cautious about quoting client praise, because most of it is polite. This one was measured against sixteen other installs by people who had watched all of them, which makes it useful rather than flattering.
The project came in ahead of expectations. That is worth saying plainly, because a ten month schedule has a lot of places to lose a week and almost none to win one back.
What made the difference
Survey the building, not the drawing. Every hung system we have ever installed has had at least one place where the structure and the model disagreed. Finding those in week one is cheap. Finding them in month eight is not.
Set the sorter as if nobody will ever check it again, because in practice nobody will until it starts misrouting.
Keep the zones honest. A phased handover only works if the line between finished work and live work is physical and obvious. Tape is not a boundary.
Ten months is a long time to keep a crew sharp. We rotated people through different equipment types rather than leaving anyone on the same task for the whole run, which kept the quality up and kept good tradespeople from walking. A carton sorter and a gravity run ask for different habits, and a tradesperson who has set both is worth more on the next job than one who has only ever set the easy half.
If you are planning a build of this size, the honest advice is to budget more survey time than feels necessary and less contingency than you think you will need. Get the first one right and the rest of the line follows it.
Project Photos
