The Benefits of Overhead Conveyors in Manufacturing and Warehousing

With warehouse and manufacturing space in the UK at a premium, it’s more important than ever that space utilisation and space efficiency are a priority to enable efficient operations. Often overlooked, the vertical space within a facility has the potential to provide a much-needed boost to the overall footprint of the building. Moving goods above the workspace instead of across the floor frees up valuable real estate, improves safety, and creates a flexible and scalable flow of material. Overhead conveyor solutions are becoming increasingly important within the wider conveyor industry, supporting assembly lines, logistics operations, and distribution centres.

What is an Overhead Conveyor?

An overhead conveyor is a material handling solution that typically suspends loads from a track mounted above head height. Carriers, such as hooks, trolleys, slings, trays, long trolleys, or custom fixtures, travel along the track, pulled by a chain, belt, or individually driven trolleys with a drive mechanism.

There are several different types of overhead conveyors commonly seen in warehouse and manufacturing facilities, including:

Powered Track: These systems use a powered chain to move products along a fixed path, suitable for automating high-volume production and assembly processes.
Power & Free Systems: A two-track design (one powered, one free) enables carriers to accumulate, stop, switch lanes, and sequence independently, ideal for buffering and selective routing. These power & free conveyors use enclosed track with guide rollers for precise movement.
EMS (Electrified Monorail Systems): The motorised trolleys receive power from the rail and are equipped with a motor and onboard intelligence that enables each goods carrier to work independently to provide efficient and high-speed movement of goods.
Free Track: These systems rely on manual or gravity movement and are often used for lighter loads or more simplified workflows, offering flexibility in layout changes.

Related Technology – Belt Conveyor: Additionally, overhead chain conveyors can consist of more standard conveyor equipment such as belt conveyors that use incline and decline conveyors, or spiral conveyors, to transport goods to upper levels of a warehouse or manufacturing facility.

In all cases, the type of overhead conveyor needed depends on the type of goods to be transported: size, shape, weight, and specific requirements such as temperature or meeting cleanroom standards. Each factor will impact the selection process to ensure the best overhead conveyor is implemented to provide safe, scalable, and efficient automation systems.

What Are Overhead Conveyors Used For?

Overhead conveyor systems hang from the ceiling or are supported from above and are designed to carry products through different stages of production, assembly, and packaging, as well as handle sortation, pallet handling conveyors, and returns activities.

In the Manufacturing sector, from food processing to automotive assembly lines, overhead conveyors play a crucial role in ensuring the efficient and safe flow of materials. They are adept at handling specific tasks, including:

Process sequencing: Moving parts between fabrication, washing, painting, drying, assembly, and inspection points.
Thermal/process environments: Transporting items through ovens, cure tunnels, or wash zones where floor-mounted conveyors would be impractical.

For Warehousing & E-commerce, overhead conveyors handle a wide variety of items, helping to streamline storage, retrieval, and order fulfilment operations. Key activities include:

Goods transportation: Relocate items or totes over racking aisles, automation stations, warehouse robots, and high-traffic zones.
Reverse logistics & returns: Hanging garments or consumer goods are sorted and transported to inspection stations or returned to storage.

Key Benefits of Overhead Conveyors

Overhead conveyors offer numerous benefits by transporting goods at height within warehouses and manufacturing facilities, such as:

Optimised Floor space

Overhead conveyors help free up valuable floor space, enabling better operational organisation, with space for other conveyor equipment, pallet handling conveyors, storage, or processing lines that can handle more product throughput.

Improved Efficiency

Automating the transport of goods reduces the need for manual handling, which improves speed, accuracy, and efficiency. This supports faster assembly processes and reduces the potential for bottlenecks and costly downtime.

Enhanced Safety

Transporting goods above the height of manual workers, automation lines, and forklifts reduces the risk of workplace accidents.

Customised & Scalable

Modular motorized overhead conveyors provide high levels of customisation, able to fit within compact or highly specialised facilities. Modular designs also allow the solution to be easily expanded or reconfigured in line with product changes without causing significant downtime.

Enhanced Quality Control

Automating assembly, sortation, or packaging using overhead conveyors enables strict quality control and product traceability with uniform material flow.

Reduced Labour Costs

Minimising the use of manual labour for repetitive or hazardous material handling reduces costs and reliance on workers to perform high-volume and intensive tasks. This enables workers to be assigned to more value-added tasks, improving workplace satisfaction.

From space optimisation to enhanced safety and productivity, overhead conveyors continue to deliver critical benefits that support efficiency and growth for UK manufacturers and the wider logistics and distribution industry.

Industry Sectors and Typical Applications

Taking advantage of using the vertical space within a warehouse or manufacturing facility, overhead conveyors offer a reliable solution to a wide range of applications. Overhead chain conveyors are extremely robust and can also pass through environmentally challenging production areas such as ovens and robot work cells that are off-limits to humans, broadening their scope for adoption across industry. Here are some of the most common applications seen today:

Automotive

Body-in-white, paint shops, final assembly kitting, trim part presentation.

3PL & E-commerce

Overhead tote or item movement, exceptions sortation, returns processing.

Food & Beverage (non-direct food contact)

Crate/tote handling, rack return, washdown-safe carriers.

Fashion/Retail

Hanging garment transportation, sortation to pack lanes.

Aerospace

Component treatment, paint, and sealant processes, sequence delivery to workstations.

Appliance & Consumer Electronics

Multi-stage assembly, test, and pack lines with buffers.

Integration with Smart Technologies

Overhead conveyors are often integrated with other smart automation systems such as PLC control systems, sensors, and vision systems to enhance routing, speed adjustments, quality control, and item tracking. Some of the most common technologies integrated with overhead conveyor systems include:

Vision Systems

Quality control: Cameras check presence/absence, orientation, surface defects.
Part verification: Identify and verify each part and reroute the item if a defect is detected.
OCR & label read: Confirm individual item data as goods pass a fixed camera.

Sensors & Data Capture

Barcode & RFID readers: Track carrier and SKU through every zone for full inventory visibility and traceability.
Weight sensors: Detect missing/extra components; trigger rejects.
Environmental sensors: Monitor temperature or humidity for production process consistency.

Controls & Software Integration

PLC control layers: Interfacing with control software, including MES, WMS, WES, and ERP.
Digital twins & simulation: Validate capacity, accumulation, and cycle times before build.
OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) dashboards: Throughput, availability, quality; alarm history, and root-cause logs.

Building a Fully Automated Process for Optimised Material Flow

Overhead conveyors act as a vital cog in the internal movement, processing, or assembly of goods, yet are often integrated with a variety of automation systems and material handling solutions as well as manual handling to deliver a fully optimised flow of material. Here is a selection of automation solutions and conveyor equipment often integrated with overhead conveyors:

Inbound Line Feed: AS/RS or mini-load shuttle retrieves totes or parts from storage. AMRs/AGVs bring parts from storage to load stations, handling via robotic arms or manually. Infeed conveyors (belt/roller/spiral) allow operators or robotic pickers to load carriers.
On-Line Processing: Automated diverters send carriers to the correct section of the manufacturing process. Buffers and accumulators hold stock until required. Rework loops and reject shoots reroute goods without stopping the main flow.
Outbound Offload: Robotic unloaders remove goods from the line for operators to process. Order consolidation can include shelving for order consolidation, pack stations, or stacking pallets using a robot palletiser or robotic arm. Automated packaging systems such as baggers, carton erectors, and print-and-apply labellers integrate seamlessly with pallet handling conveyors.

Every aspect of a packaging, processing, or assembly line has the capacity to be automated through integrated technologies, further enhancing efficiency, scalability, and productivity.