Manufacturing is a competitive environment. Profit margins are slim and many companies are outsourcing fabrication to areas with lower labor costs. The benefit of low cost manufacturing comes at a price, however. Longer supply chains require more inventory to ensure product is available to fluctuating demand. This excess inventory needs to be unloaded, stored and kept secure in warehouses until the customer wants it.

Whether manufacturing offshore or locally, optimizing warehouse storage space is a critical requirement to remain competitive. Warehouse layout and rack choices are important factors in ensuring efficient product flow. A warehouse that is set up properly will reduce costs significantly, by reducing the amount of inventory needed to be stored, minimizing forklifts and associated fuel and repair costs and eliminating extraneous physical counts by organizing product better.

Warehouse Layout Planning

Before setting up any warehouse racks, the overall strategy of storage needs to be considered. How is material going to flow?

Starting with the shipping docks, follow the path of incoming material. How often is it arriving? How long does it need to be stored? Where will the forklifts be driving? To avoid redundant travel, routes should be set up so that forklifts can travel small distances to frequent storage locations and farther for slower moving product. Ideally, lanes should be designated as one way. This will reduce accidents and allow drivers to travel at higher speeds.

A smart warehouse design avoids any dead spaces where material can be lost forever. Awkward corners and undesignated space invite material handlers to temporarily set pallets down, only to leave them there indefinitely. Ensure all areas are allocated to specific product and labeled appropriately.

Following the path of material from incoming to outgoing will show any bottlenecks or restrictions in flow. For high volume warehouses, it may be worthwhile to have separate loading and unloading docks. This way product will flow from one dock to the other, with storage located between the docks, i.e. the rest of the warehouse.

Choose Racks to Suit the Warehouse Layout

Once the general flow of the warehouse has been determined, racks must be chosen to make best use of the available floor space. Since almost all material shipped by truck is stored on pallets, different variations of pallets racks are used in most storage facilities.

Standard pallet racks are the default choice for any facility that has high turnover and many different products. Every pallet on a pallet rack is accessible to the forklift driver. This ensures that absolutely no parts will be buried or lost for years. Each storage location can be labeled and referred to on a master list, whether electronic or simply on a piece of paper. The material handler can easily follow a grid schematic, tracking rows and columns until he reaches the location where material is to be stored.

This benefit of accessibility comes at a cost. An aisle is needed between each set of pallet racks, so the forklift can get to the pallet. In many cases, however, this degree of accessibility is not necessary. Sometimes, entire trucks deliver the same product. These skids don’t necessarily need to be individually accessible. Since they are all the same, they could be stored in rows, with the back ones buried until the front ones are removed.

Double deep pallet racks allow for two rows of pallets to be stored, at the expense of the back row not being readily accessible. With two pallets of like material, one in front of the other, double deep pallet racks increase the floor space used to store pallets by eliminating extra aisles. Forklifts, however, need special extended length forks in order to reach the second row of pallets.

Push back racks are an alternative to double deep racks that don’t require forklifts with special equipment. The forklift loads the first pallet onto a rolling cart on a track in the first row. The next pallet gets loaded in the same location, pushing the first pallet to the back row, since it rolls freely on the cart. When the front pallet is removed, the back pallet rolls forward to the front position.

Drive-in and drive-through racks provide maximum density by allowing forklifts to drive right into the rack. This means that more than two or three rows can be stored in front of each other. The forklift can just drive in the access material from the back rows when the front rows are empty. These racks are best suited to large quantities of the same part number, where the order used doesn’t matter.

If FIFO is important, then the best option is a pallet flow rack. Even when the same material is stored together, it is often important that the oldest material is used first, particularly with perishable items or products with short shelf lives.

Pallet flow racks allow pallets to be loaded from one end and unloaded from the other end. The pallets rest on inclined rollers and gravity forces them to the lowest end. When loaded from the back, the pallets flow to the front where they are unloaded. The first pallet loaded will be the first pallet unloaded, giving rise to the term “First In First Out”, or FIFO.

Many different options exist for warehouse racks. Depending on flow of material, the shelf life of the product and the variety of pallets being stored, specific types racks may or may not have a place. Warehouse racking is a compromise between density and accessibility. The more dense a product is packed, the more can be stored, but the less accessible it becomes. When profit margins are slim, the right choice of warehouse rack and an optimal warehouse layout can be the difference in this competitive business environment.