Pallet Rack Shelving Archives - Action Wholesale Products

February 11, 2019ActionWP

3 Signs Your Warehouse Has Outgrown Your Current Pallet Rack System

The increase in sales orders has placed a strain on warehouse operations. Workers are scrambling to get forklifts and pallet jacks down tight aisles to remove merchandise from shelves. Trying to fill store front shelves and delivery trucks with products feels frustrating as warehouse productivity slows down to a crawl.

One reason for the issue may involve your pallet racks. It’s quite possible you may have outgrown your pallet rack system. Your sales growth significantly impacts operations, causing your warehouse to outgrow its current shelving management system. Here are three signs to look for to determine if your current pallet rack processes are not keeping pace with warehouse growth.

Your Warehouse Has Obstructed Aisles

When going down the aisle, you may find a pallet sitting right on the floor as you need to get to the other side to reach certain products. When merchandise pallets have to be placed in the aisles because there is no more room up on the shelves, it is time to consider whether your current rack system is meeting your changing needs.

Solution: Look at available warehouse space to determine if a new arrangement can allow you to place in more pallet racks while still providing enough room for materials handling equipment to move down aisles. Measure the rack space, aisle space, and the size of merchandise pallets to create a layout that works with your specific warehouse dimensions.

Sagging Load Beams

When you first opened your business, you purchased racks that had load beam capacity levels of 3,000 lbs. Yet now your pallets are bigger and far heavier. Also, you are stacking multiple pallets on top of one another on the same shelf beams. In time, the weight of products on beams has caused it to sag, threatening to send pallets to the ground.

Solution: Upgrading pallet rack systems with stronger load beams that have high tensile strength 14-gauge steel will allow you to hold heavier pallets. You can outfit your warehouse with pallet racks that can hold from 5,000 to 7,000 lbs. load capacities to eliminate load beam sagging.

Not Enough Aisle Space

It’s easy to think that the warehouse storage issue can be solved by adding just one extra pallet into the floor layout. However, one extra pallet rack becomes two extra and then five extra as you begin to eliminate and narrow aisles. In time, your forklifts and pallet jacks don’t have enough space to retrieve items.

Solution: If warehouse floor space is limited, consider going vertical with your pallet rack needs if you have high warehouse ceilings. Pallet racks can come in 8-foot, 10-foot, 12-foot, 15-foot and 16-foot heights.

When it comes time to upgrade your pallet rack systems to better work with your warehouse, seek help from Action Wholesale Products. We have warehouse shelving, racks, storage bins and other inventory management products to increase your warehouse productivity.

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

February 7, 2018ActionWP

How and Why to Incorporate Pallet Racking into Your Small Sized Warehouse

Every warehouse faces challenges making the best use of the available space, and this is especially true when working in a smaller sized warehouse. The space may feel adequate for most of the year, but at times, perhaps when sales and orders are at a higher level than ordinary, the usable space isn’t well optimized.

In those types of situations, it’s easy for a warehouse to become overcrowded and messy because there’s no room for everything to have its own designated area. There are several ways to address the problem, but designing and utilizing an efficient pallet racking system is perhaps one of the easiest ways to increase the usable area of a warehouse without incurring the additional costs of having to rent or buy more square footage.

Maximizing Available Space

Pallet racking allows for materials to be stored all the way up to the ceiling with access by a forklift. Simply adding one higher stack effectively doubles the storage area a warehouse can maintain, and three or four tiers of stackable pallet shelving can likewise triple or quadruple the efficiency of a warehouse. When only storing one level of pallets, all the extra room between the top of the pallet’s contents and the ceiling is being wasted when more product could potentially be stored there.

Maintaining Order with an Organized Storage System

Maintaining order in a smaller warehouse not only allows the area to function more efficiently by allowing workers to find needed product quickly but is also a safety measure. When pathways are blocked it makes it difficult for a forklift driver to see people on foot. Clutter also makes preparing shipments harder when staff has to search for boxes stored behind other boxes. Make employee workflow easier by maintaining both ordered pathways and an organized storage system.

Smaller warehouses simply cannot afford to waste space. Pallet racks allow for floor to ceiling storage, improving efficiency and organization, and delaying buy or rent more space.

September 21, 2017ActionWP

5 Tips for Setting Up Your Shelving Units

Whether you run an e-commerce store or just have a very active garage, your shelving units could likely stand a little reorganization. Planning out each square foot of space will take time, but ultimately it will save you time over the long run. Use these five tips to get more out your space.

1. High Vs. Low-Flow

Juggernauts like Ikea and Amazon put all their efforts into high-flow warehouses, and you should be applying the same concept to your space. High-flow items are the ones you use the most often, so they require the bulk of your time and resources. Keep these high-flow items in mind if you’re planning to buy any type of gadgetry. No matter how elaborate or simple your space, the low-flow items should get as little attention as possible.

2. Think Up

Vertical storage units give you more space to work with, and it’s one of the best ways to avoid having to buy extra space for your warehouse. It may throw a wrench into the way you currently access your items, but the adjustment will be worth it.

3. Practice Flexibility

Warehouses change over time, and too many warehouses just develop workarounds for those changes rather than coming up with sustainable solutions. Instead of trying to cram a new product into a too small space, consider how you can plan your warehouse to be flexible enough to fully support what’s in demand.

4. Consider the Weight

If the weight isn’t distributed evenly across the shelves, you risk collapse or an unsustainable amount of sway. Anyone who works with the shelves should have a good understanding of how each shift in weight affects the rest of the inventory. It’s especially common for newcomers to a warehouse to make a mistake when it comes to loading. Ensure you account for all the weight the shelving will bear before ordering the units.

5. Upkeep Is Critical

Even the most advanced technology or shelf set-up can’t stop the accumulation of junk on your shelves. No matter how fool-proof your system is, it will still take a lot of work to keep it all together. Odd circumstances will arise where things have to out of place for a time. The key is to take care of misplaced items right away.

September 8, 2015ActionWP

Why Choose Wire Decking Rather than Wood Decking?

Installing Wire Mesh Decking When it comes to your warehouse storage decking, you have several different options. Two of the most popular, however, are wire decking and wood decking. While each decking style has its pros and cons, wire decking is becoming more of the preferred style in many environments for a variety of reasons. Here is a look at some of the reasons why:

Improved Visibility

Every warehouse manager has been there before, looking – and being unable to find – some inventory that needs to be located. Eventually, you find it – but you waste precious time in doing so. That’s much less of an issue with wire decking, as this type of decking greatly improves visibility to help managers and workers maximize their efficiency.

Reduced Dust Buildup

Dust buildup is a common issue with wood decking, which leads to additional maintenance and other potential troubleshooting. While dust can still be an issue with wire decking, it’s much less of one.

Improved Sprinkler Effectiveness

For this reason, local fire codes in some cities actually require wire decking, because the wire decking surface allows emergency sprinklers to work much more effectively in a fire situation.

Built-in Supports

Support channels are actually built in to the wire decking itself, not only giving it a lot of rigidity, but load bearing capacity as well. In general, wire decking uses up to four different support channels and can withstand some 2,500 pounds. It’s also worth noting that wire decking can be custom made to withstand more weight.

Increased Airflow

Again, just as how the more open surface of wire decking help emergency sprinklers work more efficiently and also helps to reduce dust buildup, another benefit to the decking style is that it permits increased airflow. This is vital for several reasons, and can also reduce heating and cooling costs in warehouse environments.

As you can see, there are many benefits to wire decking when compared to other decking styles, such as wood. In addition to all of the aforementioned benefits, it’s also worth noting that wire decking is very easy to setup. For more information on wire decking – and all of its benefits – contact Action Wholesale Products today at 800-966-3999.

July 31, 2015ActionWP

Tips for Installing Pallet Rack Shelving in Your Warehouse

Warehouse organization requires innovate solutions. Pallet racks are the necessary shelving to keep products stacked in an organized manner for easy retrieval. These storage racks are a bit different from other warehouse shelving as a forklift can load and unload large wooden pallets of products directly onto the shelves. If you have ordered pallet rack […]