Material Handling Equipment Selection for a Galvanizing Steel Industry Using Combined AHP-GRA Model

India has emerged as a fast developing country in 21st century. From the beginning of this century country has experienced many inventions and developments in its industrial sector. During these years, export capacity of the country has increased a lot. Keeping all this factors in mind one can easily understand the importance of industries in India. In industries material handling plays very important role, because handling of material using conventional manual practices needs a huge expenditure of time, money as well as energy of the workers. For this reason, many types of material handling equipments have been suggested in the literature. As we all know, in last ten years, India has reported a remarkable progress in global market and is progressing continuously; importance of material handling facilities increases a lot. Present research work is based on material handling equipment selection for a steel industry. Yet there are many types of steel industries are present in the country but here in this research work emphasis is made on galvanizing steel manufacturing industry. One of the basic reasons of choosing this industry is that in literature very less or almost nil research has been reported by various researchers in this field. Also it has been observed by the candidate the workers in a galvanizing steel industry work in very adverse conditions which ultimately, may affect their life. In the present research work, zinc pot section of hot dipped galvanizing steel manufacturing industry which is having manual delivery system for pouring zinc and aluminum slabs has been considered as the research frame. For this system first of all criteria has been finalized with the help of industry personnel as well academicians. After that prioritization of criteria has been made with the help of Analytical Hierarchy Process, and finally scores of the alternatives (Automatic system, Conveyer’s delivery and Manual delivery) are reported using Grey Rational Analysis (GRA) model, the ranking of which has determined the best alternative.