Pharmaceutical, healthcare, and life science companies face mounting pressure from evolving regulatory requirements, rising fulfillment costs, and intensifying accuracy demands. In this environment, automation isn’t optional—it’s essential. Designed Conveyor Systems (DCS) helps distributors of these critical products stay compliant and competitive.

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Pet Food

Pet food distribution operations are anything but standard. From bulky kibble bags to delicate fish tanks, stock keeping unit (SKU) complexity and fulfillment pressure are always on the rise. Designed Conveyor Systems (DCS) partners with leading pet retailers to design and engineer automation, software, and material handling systems that keep operations agile, accurate, and ready for what’s next.

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Inventory Management within Warehouse Operations

Home Improvement

When your distribution center handles everything from hammers to hot tubs, operational complexity isn’t a challenge—it’s your daily reality. Home improvement retailers face intense pressure to meet rising consumer expectations across multiple channels—from in-store pickups to last-mile delivery. At Designed Conveyor Systems (DCS), we specialize in engineering material handling and automation solutions that help home improvement distribution centers keep pace, reduce cost, and drive accuracy at scale.

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Woman with salesperson at the counter of sports shop

Sporting Goods

Navigating the unique demands of the sporting goods retail industry requires a distribution strategy that’s both agile and precise. From handling seasonal surges to managing a diverse range of products—from bulky equipment to small accessories—your warehouse operations are the key to a seamless customer experience. Our expertise helps sporting goods retailers streamline their distribution warehouses, improving order accuracy, boosting productivity, and ensuring your team can efficiently move products from the receiving dock to the final customer, no matter the season.

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Footwear

In the fast-paced world of footwear retail requires a distribution strategy that can handle a vast array of styles, sizes, and seasonal trends with precision and speed. From managing a high volume of SKUs to ensuring accurate order fulfillment and returns processing, your distribution center is the engine that drives customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Our expertise helps footwear retailers streamline their distribution centers, improving inventory management, accelerating order processing, and ensuring your team can efficiently move products from the receiving dock to the final customer, no matter the season.

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Wholesale & Industrial Distribution

Designed Conveyor Systems (DCS) partners with wholesale, industrial, and electronics distributors to design efficient, optimized fulfillment solutions. Every operation DCS designs streamlines end-to-end functional processes—from inbound receiving and putaway to picking, packing, and shipping. Designed Conveyor Systems (DCS) partners with wholesale, industrial, and electronics distributors to design efficient, optimized fulfillment solutions. Every operation DCS designs streamlines end-to-end functional processes—from inbound receiving and putaway to picking, packing, and shipping.

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ASURE by DCS

Services

Lifecycle Services for

Material Handling Systems

Lifecycle Services for material handling systems are built to sustain performance long-term and reduce total cost of ownership. DCS combines preventive maintenance, technical support, operator and maintenance training, and spare parts into flexible service models aligned to mitigate your operational risk.

Available for DCS design-build installations, or systems delivered by other integrators and OEMs, our warehouse lifecycle services help your automation and material handling equipment operate smarter, safer, and more reliably.

Schedule your assessment today.

Cover Photo - Lifecycle Services-compressed

A Glance: Why Choose DCS for Lifecycle Services

Maximize uptime, protect your equipment investment, and keep your warehouse running at peak efficiency with a dedicated partner by your side.

Round-the-Clock Operational Assurance

Unplanned downtime doesn’t wait for business hours. DCS’ dedicated support engineers are available 24/7/365 to deliver rapid troubleshooting and restore system availability fast.

Shift from Reactive to Predictive

Stop emergency breakdowns before they happen. Customized preventive and predictive maintenance schedules keep your systems running within peak performance parameters year-round.

Long-Term Asset Protection

From critical spare parts provisioning to system upgrades and modernizing aging equipment, DCS extends the operational lifespan and ROI of your material handling equipment.

Single-Source Accountability

From day-one commissioning through mid-lifecycle retrofits, DCS takes full responsibility for your system’s health—eliminating the hassle of managing multiple vendor contracts.

What’s Included in DCS Lifecycle Services?

Lifecycle Services for your warehouse and material handling equipment can combine any of the following:

Preventive conveyor maintenance
Emergency and same-day field response (regionally deployed)
24/7 technical phone support
Resident or supplemental technicians
Spare parts management and stocking
Refresher and advanced training
System assessments
Continuous improvement recommendations
Your peace of mind

You choose your level of coverage. DCS helps tailor the rest.

Schedule your assessment today.

Man checking notebook and packages on a DCS conveyor

Upgrade From Reactive Repair to Continuous Improvement

Lifecycle Services are not just about responding when something in the warehosue breaks. Through regular reviews and quarterly reporting, DCS aggregates data from maintenance activity, remote monitoring, sensor data, faults and error reporting, and service history to deliver:

Root cause insights
Reliability trends
Parts consumption patterns
Recommendations to improve uptime
Guidance on where to invest next
Peer performance benchmarking

Let DCS convert your material handling preventive conveyor maintenance and technical support needs from a cost center into a performance strategy that enhances your bottom line.

Schedule your assessment today.

From Reactive Repair to Continuous Improvement-compressed

Spare Parts Stocked for When You Need Them

Waiting weeks for a critical component isn’t acceptable. That’s why DCS examines usage history to analyze and identify high-risk, high-value items. Then, we stock the key parts most likely to impact your operation from dozens of OEMs, including:

Allen-Bradley
Baldor
Banner
Bussmann
Cognex
Colson Casters
Dodge Bearings
Festo
Fives
Flexco
Flow-Turn
Habasit
Hytrol
Intralox
Interroll
Kaeser
Koerber
Lewco
Parker
Pioneer
Schneider
SEW Eurodrive
SICK
Siemens
Square D
Sumitomo
Talos
Turck
And many others

You’ll experience less downtime, faster recovery, and lower risk for your material handling operations.

Order Parts

Training That Keeps Pace with Turnover

New hires happen. Roles change. Knowledge walks out the door.

DCS offers hands-on, practical training for your team — from system walkthroughs to maintenance procedures and refreshers — so operators and technicians stay confident and capable. By partnering with DCS, your team gains access to classroom sessions, hands-on training, and on-demand videos.

Curriculum includes system walkthroughs, fault recovery procedures, best practices, mechanical and electrical subsystem training, guidance through DCS’s proprietary warehouse execution system (WES) DATUM, superuser certifications and re-certifications, and much more.

Schedule your assessment today.

Conveyor & Warehouse Automation Lifecycle Services FAQs

For conveyor systems, maintenance typically includes inspecting motors, gear reducers, bearings, rollers, belts, chains, pulleys, photo eyes, variable frequency drives (VFDs), emergency stops, safety guarding, and electrical components. Technicians also clean equipment, remove debris, adjust sensors, track belts, and identify wear before failures occur.

For sortation equipment, maintenance focuses on drive components, chains, bearings, sprockets, motors, reducers, safety systems, structural integrity, and overall operating performance. Routine inspections help prevent unexpected downtime and maintain sorting accuracy.

For AS/RS and shuttle systems, technicians inspect shuttle vehicles, tracks, rails, sensors, wheels, telescopic mechanisms, electrical connections, safety devices, and communication systems. Cleaning and lubrication are critical to maintaining reliable operation in high-density storage environments.

For autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), maintenance includes cleaning sensors and laser scanners, inspecting drive systems and batteries, testing safety functions, replacing wear components, maintaining charging stations, and verifying navigation performance.

A typical maintenance program also includes safety inspections, software and controls reviews, spare parts planning, condition monitoring, and detailed reporting on equipment health and lifecycle risks.

It largely depends on the operating environment—operating hours, ambient temperature, air quality (airborne dust, oil, or moisture), product weight, product volume, and operator practices. In general, though, technicians regularly walk the system to look and listen for issues such as hot reducers, loud motors, squealing bearings, mis-tracked belts, and loose equipment. A high-volume system with in-house maintenance does this daily, while a contracted maintenance group may perform these inspections monthly. Issues are resolved as they are found, generally scheduled during the next shutdown period.

Certain maintenance activities are performed less frequently because the components experience slower wear rates. For example, many conveyor manufacturers call for quarterly inspections of chain tension, motor starters, contactors, and variable frequency drives (VFDs). Just like the more frequent inspections, issue resolution is scheduled at the next available shutdown.

DCS also recommends conducting a comprehensive Lifecycle System Assessment at least annually for standard warehouse operations. However, high-throughput facilities operating 24/7—or operations preparing for peak seasonal demands (such as Q4 peak)—should complete assessments semi-annually. A re-assessment is also critical anytime your facility undergoes significant operational shifts, software upgrades, or changes in product profiles/dimensions.

Preventive maintenance follows a scheduled service plan based on time or usage intervals. Predictive maintenance uses equipment condition, performance trends, and inspection data to identify issues before failure occurs. Combining preventive and predictive maintenance helps maximize equipment uptime while minimizing unnecessary maintenance costs.

The DCS 24/7/365 support hotline connects you directly with experienced systems engineers immediately. Depending on your Service Level Agreement (SLA), we offer rapid remote diagnostic response (often within 15 minutes) as well as prioritized dispatch for on-site emergency support for critical system outages and emergency repair situations.

Remote monitoring provides continuous visibility into the health and performance of your warehouse automation and material handling systems. DCS securely monitors key system components—including PLCs, WCS/WES platforms, HMIs, network infrastructure, and connected automation equipment—to identify potential issues before they impact operations.

Through scheduled system health checks and performance analysis, DCS tracks communication errors, system alarms, device health, software performance, network stability, and equipment utilization. Results are compared against historical trends and industry best practices to identify emerging risks and opportunities for improvement.

Our engineers review this data regularly and provide actionable recommendations to improve reliability, increase throughput, reduce downtime, address component obsolescence, and strengthen cybersecurity. Remote monitoring can identify issues such as recurring conveyor faults, increasing PLC communication errors, declining network performance, abnormal motor run times, or aging hardware before they lead to operational disruptions.

The result is a more reliable, data-driven maintenance strategy that improves system uptime, reduces emergency service events, extends equipment life, and lowers total cost of ownership (TCO).

The cost of warehouse automation downtime varies by operation, but even a short outage can have a significant impact on productivity and profitability. Direct costs often include lost throughput, idle labor, overtime, emergency repair expenses, expedited freight, and missed shipping deadlines. Indirect costs can include customer dissatisfaction, chargebacks, inventory disruptions, and increased operational risk.

For a high-volume distribution center, the financial impact of downtime can quickly reach thousands of dollars per hour, depending on order volume, labor costs, and the criticality of the affected equipment. A failed conveyor, sorter, AS/RS system, or WCS/WES platform can quickly create bottlenecks that affect the entire operation.

The most expensive outages are often not caused by catastrophic failures, but by preventable issues such as worn components, obsolete hardware, deferred maintenance, software communication problems, or a lack of critical spare parts. While many major incidents can be resolved relatively quickly, recovery time and business impact depend heavily on preparation. Facilities with documented procedures, trained personnel, available spare parts, and access to technical support can often restore operations significantly faster than those forced to diagnose problems and source parts during an outage.

A proactive lifecycle services program helps reduce downtime by identifying emerging risks before they become failures, improving maintenance planning, monitoring system health, and ensuring critical equipment remains reliable during peak operating periods. By preventing even a single major outage, many facilities can recover the cost of a maintenance program several times over.

Simply request more information through our contact form. DCS’ service engineers will review your existing equipment, identify critical risk areas, and build a custom service level agreement tailored to your operational budget and uptime targets.