EDUCATE. ELEVATE. ENGINEER EXCELLENCE.
Welcome to the Material Handling Academy. This is the whole course, front to back: thirty-five lessons that take you from your first walk across a warehouse floor to signing off a system you designed. You won't find catalog pages or spec sheets here. What you'll find is how a solutions professional actually thinks, one decision at a time, so that by the end you're not looking things up, you're the person other people look to. Start at Part One and keep going. Everything builds.
Been here before, on another device or after a cleared browser? and pick up where you left off.
Eight parts, thirty-five lessons. Each lesson ships as student material, an instructor guide, slides, a worksheet, a poster, and three social cards. Part openers and checkpoints bracket every part.
Before you spec a thing, learn to read the floor and the customer.
Lesson 1 The Profession
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Lesson 2 The Warehouse Ecosystem
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Lesson 3 Reading an Operation
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Lesson 4 Customer Discovery
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Know what you're moving. The product sets every rule that follows.
Lesson 5 Think Like the Package
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Lesson 6 The MTBH and the Design Envelope
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Lesson 7 The Product Decision Chain
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Design the flow first. Equipment is what you reach for after.
Lesson 8 Flow Before Equipment
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Lesson 9 The Layered Flow Diagram
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Lesson 10 Rate and Bottlenecks
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The heart of the craft: how conveyance actually moves work.
Lesson 11 How Conveyors Work
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Lesson 12 Transportation vs Accumulation
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Lesson 13 Accumulation Design
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Lesson 14 Changing Direction and Elevation
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Lesson 15 Transfers and Merges
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Lesson 16 Sortation
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Lesson 17 The Automation Landscape
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Give the system senses and judgment so it runs itself.
Lesson 18 Control Philosophy
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Lesson 19 Sensing and Identification
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Lesson 20 Machine Controls
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Lesson 21 Power and Networks
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Lesson 22 Data and Decisions
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Lesson 23 Recovery, Diagnostics, and the Operator
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Prove it works before it's built, on paper and against reality.
Lesson 24 The Perfect World Problem
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Lesson 25 The Gap Check and Capacity Proof
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Lesson 26 Reliability Engineering
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Lesson 27 Validate for People
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A design nobody understands never gets built. Make the case.
Lesson 28 The Drawing Is the Plan
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Lesson 29 The Business Case
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Lesson 30 The Proposal
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Lesson 31 The Room
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Hand it off, stand it up, and sign your name to it.
Lesson 32 The Handoff
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Lesson 33 Execution Support
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Lesson 34 Commissioning and Acceptance
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Lesson 35 Becoming the Engineer
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The academy keeps building. Here is what is on the bench, being written to the same field-first standard as the thirty-five lessons you just walked.
The panel behind the conveyor: PLCs, VFDs, safety circuits, and how to read a ladder rung the way the electrician on your line already does.
Unit loads, not cartons. Rack, reach trucks, drive-in and pushback, and why the pallet you design for decides the shape of the building around it.
The two ways to close the gap between an order and a picker, when each one earns its keep, and what each does to your labor plan and your floor.
The layer that tells the equipment what to do. What a warehouse control system owns, where it hands off to the WMS, and how to spec one without getting sold one.
Drawing the system you designed so it can actually get built: layers, scale, title blocks, and the conveyor centerline discipline that keeps a plan view honest.
The reference layer that sits above the lessons: how we work, the full map, the language, and the Riverside project that runs through the whole course.
The MHA Way Curriculum Map Poster Field Glossary Instructor Playbook instructor Riverside Student Brief Riverside Instructor Guide instructor Riverside Simulation
Interactive tools that run the same tested math as the in-lesson TRY IT widgets. Open one and check your own numbers.
Working documents you keep open on the desk while you design.
Two conversational partners trained on the course. Open the local copies, or use the published versions.