When space is at real premium in your stock room or warehouse, then having an effective method of increasing the amount of storage space available will allow you to manage more stock at any one time. One of the best ways of maximizing storage space within your warehouse is by implementing a system of drive thru pallet racks as a means to boost the way in which you can use space to better effect.
One of the drawbacks of a traditional storage area in a warehouse is that a large amount of the available floor space must be given over to paths for forklifts to operate in. These paths typically need to be wider than a standard rack, and mean that less than half of the available floor space of your store room can actually be given over to storage of pallets and the boxes that they hold. By forgoing a traditional system of racks, and using drive thru pallet racks instead, you can make use of almost 100 percent of the available space, and reduce wastage.
A drive thru pallet rack system involves placing the pallets in a large solid area. Instead of having fork lift runs between the racks of shelving, they are placed up against each other, and are then removed one at a time as required. While there are a number of disadvantages to this system, it represents the absolute best way of maximizing the use of space, and should definitely be considered by any business for which limited room could present a hurdle to expansion.
The main disadvantage of a drive thru pallet racking is that only the outermost pallets can be accessed at any time. This means that if your staff needs to get access to materials that are stored anywhere except in the outer racks, they will need to remove other articles first. When considering whether to implement this system in your workplace, it is important to decide whether the impact that it will have on being able to select different items on demand is more important than the space saving benefits that it will produce.
If the majority of your stock is a single item, or you have only a limited number of materials on pallets for storage, then drive thru pallet racks will not present any real problems to your stock control systems. Likewise, if you have predictable usage levels for any materials that you have in storage, you will be able to plan the way that they are kept within the racks so that you can get quick and easy access to the most important items without having to remove significant amounts of other stock first.
If you store many pallets with the same items, or are able to create a strategy allowing you to make much better use of your storage space, drive thru pallet racks will be an effective choice. This will allow for a much lower cost base in terms of the amount of room that your business dedicates to stock, and in turn will release more of your floor space for production and present an excellent low cost opportunity for expansion of your business without expansion of your premises.
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