Material Moving Machine Operators

Material Moving Machine Operators typically perform the following tasks: • Inform supervisors of equipment malfunctions that need to be addressed. • Observe conveyor operations and monitor lights, dials, and gauges to maintain specified operating levels and to detect equipment malfunctions. • Record production data such as weights, types, quantities, and storage locations of materials, as well as equipment performance problems and downtime. • Load, unload, or adjust materials or products on conveyors by hand, by using lifts, hoists, and scoops, or by opening gates, chutes, or hoppers. • Stop equipment or machinery and clear jams, using poles, bars, and hand tools, or remove damaged materials from conveyors. • Distribute materials, supplies, and equipment to work stations, using lifts and trucks. • Observe packages moving along conveyors to identify packages, detect defective packaging, and perform quality control. • Collect samples of materials or products, checking them to ensure conformance to specifications or sending them to laboratories for analysis. • Position deflector bars, gates, chutes, or spouts to divert flow of materials from one conveyor onto another conveyor. • Repair or replace equipment components or parts such as blades, rolls, and pumps. • Manipulate controls, levers, and valves to start pumps, auxiliary equipment, or conveyors, and to adjust equipment positions, speeds, timing, and material flows. • Weigh or measure materials and products, using scales or other measuring instruments, or read scales on conveyors that continually weigh products, to verify specified tonnages and prevent overloads. • Read production and delivery schedules, and confer with supervisors, to determine sorting and transfer procedures, arrangement of packages on pallets, and destinations of loaded pallets. • Press console buttons to deflect packages to predetermined accumulators or reject lines. • Clean, sterilize, and maintain equipment, machinery, and work stations, using hand tools, shovels, brooms, chemicals, hoses, and lubricants. • Affix identifying information to materials or products, using hand tools. • Move, assemble, and connect hoses or nozzles to material hoppers, storage tanks, conveyor sections or chutes, and pumps. • Thread strapping through strapping tools and secure battens with strapping to form protective pallets around extrusions. • Contact workers in work stations or other departments to request movement of materials, products, or machinery, or to notify them of incoming shipments and their estimated delivery times. • Join sections of conveyor frames at temporary working areas, and connect power units.