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College Industry Council on Material Handling Education

Audit Tool

The Material Handling Audit Tool provides a comprehensive audit of material handling in a facility. The MH Audit tool takes the user through a series of questions related to material handling system implementation and effectiveness to help users determine what material handling functions represent the greatest areas of opportunity for improvement. These questions are divided into two broad categories - material handling functions and aspects of material handling systems.

Five material handling functions are considered: Receiving, Shipping, Storage of Raw Materials, Storage of Finished Goods, and General Process Functions. Five aspects of material handling systems are considered: Equipment, Space, Material, People, and Information. The five material handling functions and the five aspects of material handling systems are arrayed in a five by five matrix as shown in the figure below:

The user can then select all or a subset of the cells within the matrix to audit. After choosing which areas to audit, the Audit tool will provide the user with questions related to the selected cells. The Audit tool notes the user's answers to these questions and creates an evaluation report that indicates which aspects of the material handling system should be investigated for possible improvements and efficiency gains.

The MH Audit tool is now available for downloading in either a PC or Pocket PC version. Please follow the instructions below to install the tool on your system.

Instructions for PC Version
Important steps to follow to download and install version 4f of the MH Audit tool:

NOTE! User comment reports require Microsoft Access to be installed. The MH Audit software has only been tested on Microsoft Windows XP. It may run on a MAC using MS Windows Emulator.

1) If you have installed the Material Handling Audit tool before, please uninstall it.

2) Download the file by either a) clicking on the " Download the MH Audit Software" link and choosing the Save option or b) right-clicking on the " Download the MH Audit Software" link and select the "Save Target As" option.

3) Go to the folder where you saved the file and double-click on the file "Audit_SETUP_Ver4f", the files should then be unzipped into a temporary folder of your choice.

4) Go to the temporary folder you chose and run the file setup.exe. If you experience any error messages during installation, you should be able to safely ignore them.

Changes that were made to the MH Audit Tool in Version 4f only included some minor bug fixes.