Questions to Expect From a Material Handling Design Sales Specialist

What is a Material Handling Design Sales Specialist?

A material handling design sales specialist designs, engineers, and integrates a material handling system according to their clients’ specifications, acting as the single point of contact from conception to completion of each project. While a supplier or a distributor usually only provides a limited number of products from one or two manufacturers, a design sales specialist helps customers build a custom material handling solution from the ground up.

Questions to expect from a Specialist

It is important to know the questions a specialist will pose and have all the necessary details to provide them with the answers. Here are the key points you need to touch:

The Specifics of your Organization

Every business organization has its own operational issues that make it unique. A design sales specialist will start with understanding the key operational issues that make your business unique in order to design a facility that performs well.

To understand those key issues, your design sales specialist will ask questions about how your operation works, as well as its unique attributes. The second step will be to evaluate your answers alongside data. The first step is discovery while the second is analysis.

Requirements of your Business

The first step of this phase is to understand the requirements of the business and expectations of the stakeholders. This is done to develop a better understanding of the requirements so that they can all be addressed through the ultimate system design. This will entail questions about internal needs like inventory management, streamlining of layout, and external needs like customer-service and vendor management.

Necessary Data of Operations

An important step of building a plan is analyzing the current state of operation through quantifiable data. The design sales specialist will want to quantify all the key metrics of the operation, which will lay the groundwork of all conversations about the design moving forward. The data asked can be on many aspects of the operation like inbound receipts, details about staffing, layout of the building, item master, etc. Other data requested may be for shipping and receiving practices, service stats, etc.

Order & Inventory Data

Order and inventory are important factors to be considered while developing a material handling system. These questions include:

• What does a typical order look like in terms of orders per day, lines per order, pieces per line, cartons per order, etc?
• Do certain products tend to be ordered together?
• What is the number of active SKUs currently handled, the number of SKUs expected to be handled in the future, design specs of SKUs handled, and storage requirements?

Keeping this in mind, you can be aware of what questions to expect from a material handling design sales specialistsss; and provide them with all the necessary information.