Lesson 11 named every part of a conveyor. This lesson makes the call that drives every selection after it, and it's where Michael's two Riverside failures finally get diagnosed. The one outcome every student must leave with is that transportation and accumulation are functions, not conveyor types, and that the mechanism behind an accumulation platform matters as much as the category. Two things wander if you let them: the class treats EZ as a brand instead of an architecture, and it picks a mechanism on unit price. Hold both. And protect the scope: this lesson makes the call and picks the mechanism. It doesn't size the zones. That's Lesson 13.
| Segment | Min | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Open on the two failures | 6 | Read the hook. Two systems came out of this building: one ran on air and died when the compressor dropped at peak, one stopped the whole line every time anything downstream slowed. Put the shared frame on the board. Both are the same call made wrong, before any conveyor was picked. |
| Transportation vs accumulation, on the board | 12 | Key teaching moment, below. Draw the three-section system and land the rule of accumulation: every point product might wait is a point to evaluate. This is the distinction every later selection rests on. |
| EZ naming, rapid-fire | 8 | Drill the model names until the answer is instant, then the caveat right behind it: another vendor's accumulation platform wears different letters. Category first, naming second. |
| Electric vs pneumatic mechanism | 10 | ZPA is a function, not a spec. Walk how each zone stops, electric signal versus air. Tie it straight to Riverside's first failure: air that couldn't hold at peak. |
| Selection drivers, live | 14 | Weight and speed first, a hard limit. Run the live weight-per-foot check on the Riverside cartons, below. Then behavior and total installed cost. Make them run the number, not the per-zone price. |
| Riverside diagnosis and direction | 8 | Facilitation below. Diagnose both failures, then steer the room to name the technology direction themselves. Do not hand it over. |
| Forest, close, CONTROLS CORNER preview | 2 | Fold in the MDR driver-card and zone-controller preview: electric zones talk in a daisy chain without the PLC touching every decision. The depth is Part V, Lesson 20. |
| Total | 60 | Baseline session. Expand with the stretch options below if you have 90 minutes. |
Draw a simple three-section system on the board: an induction, a queue section, a takeaway. Ask the room which is transportation and which is accumulation. Then ask the question that makes the requirement real: what happens at the queue when the takeaway goes down? A room that can answer that the queue has to hold product without crashing it, while the induction keeps feeding, understands accumulation. A room that says the whole line stops has just described the failure this lesson exists to prevent.
Then go straight into the naming drill. Call out model names at random, 190-E24, ABEZ, a sorter, NSPEZ, 190-E24EZ, a transfer, and have the room say instantly whether each accumulates. Keep going until it's automatic. The moment it is, drop the caveat: this is Hytrol's spelling. Another manufacturer's motor-driven-roller accumulation platform wears different letters and does the same job. You're teaching them to read the category, not to worship one vendor's alphabet.
Weight and speed are the first filter, and weight per foot is where students slip. Run it live on Riverside's four cartons using the Calc Logic Guide formula, weight divided by length in feet. Have the room predict which carton is worst before anyone calculates, and most will point at the 28-pound Large Case. Then work it: the Large Case is 28 / (22/12) = 15.3 lb/ft, but the Tall Case is 18 / (10/12) = 21.6 lb/ft. The Tall Case wins, because it's heavy and short. That's the whole lesson of the check: the worst case is the heaviest carton at the shortest length, not the heaviest carton on the sheet. If that number exceeds a motor-driven-roller platform's published rating, MDR is out at that point. Don't run the weight-per-zone check here; that's a zone-sizing question for Lesson 13.
The habits that go wrong here go wrong quietly, and they follow the student through the whole program. Four to catch:
This is the lesson where Michael's two failures get their diagnosis, so run it as a discussion, not a lecture. Ask two questions about each failure: what kind of machine was it, and what does that failure demand of the replacement? The first failure was pneumatic ZPA whose zone behavior depended on air the building couldn't hold, serviced by a team of one who was never trained on it. The second was transportation placed where the flow needed accumulation.
Steer the room to name the technology direction themselves, electric ZPA for the maintenance reality and the consistent gaps a sorter needs, and accumulation wherever the flow says product waits. Do not tell them. Ask. The deliverable is the transportation-versus-accumulation map and a technology direction justified by the two failures. Nothing more this session.
Hold the line on scope. When the room pushes past the call and the mechanism, name where the answer lives and move on: how much accumulation and how it releases, the zone count, the release mode, and the weight-per-zone check are Lesson 13; the merge design is Lesson 15; Aux I/O implementation is Lesson 20 in Part V; total installed cost as a payback and business case is Lesson 29. Name the category, never resolve it here. A deferral that reads as discipline keeps the design moving; one that reads as content you're withholding makes students chase it.
The transportation-versus-accumulation map they build today isn't a throwaway exercise. It goes in the Riverside project folder, dated, and it becomes the selection justification in the proposal much later in the program. The students who keep it organized from the first day are the ones whose proposals will read like they were inevitable. Don't announce that payoff. Just make the project-note habit feel like something a professional simply does. Keep this note out of the student material; the habit is worth more when they build it than when they're told to.