Businesses either buy or rent warehouses based on the square footage area they cover. The more products you can store in warehouse, the lower will be your overhead cost per unit. And hence, an efficient warehouse makes the most of the space available for storage. Now, this can be done in many different ways, utilizing a great variety of industrial storage systems and solutions.
In this post, I have covered the three most fundamental techniques for warehouse storage:
Pallet Racking
Most of the businesses these days store their products on pallets in the warehouse. Pallet racking systems are available in a great variety of styles to meet a variety of needs. A standard pallet racking stores products in vertical racks, which can reach the heights of 40 feet or more. Racks can be easily configured on different sizes of pallets, and hence leave no room for unused space and cube out the warehouse even more.
If you want to store multiple pallets of same products, push back racks are the answer. Push back racking allows the pallets to get stored several pallets deep eliminating the need of additional aisles. There are many other types of warehouse racking systems available in the market including block stacking, stacking frames, single deep pallet rack, double deep rack, drive-in rack and pallet flow rack.
Dexion, a leader in industry and commercial storage solutions, has recently launched a new one-of-a-kind pallet pull-out units to help businesses further optimize their warehouse space and boost their productivity with fast and easy picking of small and heavy items. Some warehouses also feature a combination of two or more racking systems to best meet their needs and to be as efficient as feasible.
Cubing the Warehouse
Warehouses are rented or rated based on their floor area, meaning it is considered one dimensional. However, in reality the warehouse building is three dimensional, so you can make use of the vertical space available and this storage technique is known as ‘cubing out the warehouse’.
Instead of visualizing the warehouse in one-dimensional square footage, it should be analyzed as well as used a cubic building. And to accomplish this, install multi-storey racks or shelving systems, so you can use almost five times more products on the same floor area. Also, it will considerably lower your storage cost per unit.
Material Handling
Moving products from receiving dock to the storage area and then again from there to the shipping docks is a continuous process in most of the warehouses. To bring off this, material handling equipments like forklifts are used. These equipment have travel aisles, which make it a lot easier to move products from one place to another within a warehouse.
Travel aisles should be minimum in number and narrowest in size, to the possible extent. Some material handing machines are controlled by a wire buried in the floor; it help these machines function safely and quickly in the narrow tracks.
Industrial and commercial storage has seen an endless stream of innovation since its origin. Storage products like Compactus mobile shelving units and Longspan shelving units have triggered the renaissance of the warehouse storage industry.
So, what’s stopping you now? Find a good storage specialist and upgrade your warehouse storage to leverage its benefits for your business.
Author Bio:
Kimberly is an associate editor in a publication and also works as a freelance writer. She specializes in writing about different types of industrial and commercial storage solutions such as warehouse racking, Longspan shelving and mobile shelving.
