Case Study: Turning Conveyor Projects into Conveyor Products
How GlobalRoll restructured its own manufacturing to standardize conveyor families, improve traceability, and support multi-site deployments.
GlobalRoll started as a traditional “job shop” environment, building conveyors and rollers largely as one-off projects. As demand grew, this created bottlenecks in engineering, manufacturing, and delivery. This case study explains how GlobalRoll transformed its own operation from project-driven chaos into structured, product-based conveyor families—laying the foundation for everything we deliver today.
The Challenge Inside Our Own Walls
Before GlobalRoll became a product-focused conveyor manufacturer, we faced the same issues many operations do:
- Each conveyor system was treated as a unique project.
- BOMs lived in spreadsheets, emails, and people’s heads.
- Manufacturing relied on informal routing and tribal knowledge.
- Scaling a successful design to a second line or second plant meant starting from scratch.
As product demand grew and customers asked for more repeatable solutions, it became clear that the “job shop” mentality couldn’t get us where we needed to go.
Key Pain Points
No Product Families
Conveyors were engineered as individual projects. We had similar designs, but no formally defined product families for inline box, pallet infeed, overhead chain, ZPA, or dock conveyors.
Scattered BOMs and Routings
Bills of material and routing steps were spread across multiple tools and formats. Manufacturing had to rely on experience and guesswork to move projects through the shop.
Unpredictable Scheduling
Because every project was essentially “first time,” lead times were difficult to predict. Change orders, shortages, and rework were common.
Limited Traceability
If a component failed in the field or needed to be replaced, it was not always obvious which exact variant was installed, or how it flowed through manufacturing.
Building Product Families from the Ground Up
Defining Conveyor Families
We started by defining the conveyor families that mattered most for our customers:
Each family was given its own engineering-controlled template, including assemblies, subassemblies, and components.
Engineering-Controlled BOMs and Routings
For each product family, we documented:
This became the backbone of our product structure.
Traceability as a Design Requirement
We designed templates so that critical components—like drives, chains, and key rollers—could be tracked from design through manufacturing and QA. This gave us a clear picture of what was actually installed on a given system.
How We Rolled It Out
The transformation happened in phases:
Phase 1 – Identify High-Volume Systems
We started with the conveyor families that appeared most often in our customer projects—inline box and ZPA. These became pilots for the new product-family structure.
Phase 2 – Formalize Templates
Engineering led the effort to convert “tribal knowledge” into formal templates: standard sections, modules, part substitutions, and routing steps.
Phase 3 – Align Manufacturing & Scheduling
Routings were updated in the ERP system so that work centers, setup times, and run times were defined per product family. This reduced guesswork on the shop floor.
Phase 4 – Spread to Other Families
Once the first families proved out, the approach was extended to pallet infeed, overhead chain, dock systems, and washdown conveyors.
The Results: From Chaos to Product Lines
More Predictable Lead Times
Standard routings and BOMs reduced surprises, making delivery dates more reliable.
Fewer Shortages and Expedites
Common components and hardware were standardized, improving forecasting and purchasing.
Simplified Scaling
Successful conveyor configurations could be replicated and slightly tuned, rather than re-engineered from scratch.
Stronger Traceability
When something needed attention in the field, we could trace it back to templates, BOMs, and specific lots.
Better Customer Confidence
Customers now saw our systems as product lines with defined behaviors—not one-off experiments
Plan Your Next Conveyor with GlobalRoll
If you’re ready to move away from one-off conveyor projects and toward standardized, scalable systems, we’d be glad to share what we’ve learned—and how our product families can support your operation.