For many businesses, a warehouse is a required cavernous space for containing all sorts of stock, equipment and materials. If your firm sells physical goods to its customers, you will obviously need somewhere to hold those goods until they are ready to be despatched to people.
Goods will often be stored on pallets, as it makes it easier to transport large quantities of goods in one go rather than having to go back and forth manually carrying each box. A well-kept warehouse will organise its stock by grouping them all and assigning them special reference numbers called SKUs (stock keeping units) which are used with stock management systems on a computer.
The only thing about warehouses is that it is often more efficient to store goods vertically rather than horizontally, especially if storage space in warehouses are at a premium!
Obviously you cannot stack pallets of stock on top of each other much like you might see cars in scrap yards being stacked on top of each other; such things in warehouse environments are health and safety nightmares!
Can you imagine walking past a stack of pallets and then one of them suddenly falls down towards you? The consequences of such an event occurring don’t bear thinking about.
The benefits of Racking Solutions in Warehouses
The solution to this conundrum is to install a racking system in your warehouse. There are numerous benefits of doing so, here are some of the top benefits:
- It maximises your warehouse space – even if you had a massive warehouse, storing goods horizontally is not a good use of the space. In the future you may need to store larger quantities of goods in your warehouse, by which point you will have run out of space;
- It’s a great way to organise your stock – racking systems such as the Longspan racking at Workplace Essentials enable you to organise your warehouse stock according to your requirements, making life easy for warehouse operatives and office staff when they need to find those goods to send out to customers;
- It promotes a safer working environment – instead of having boxes of stock scattered all over the floor, potentially blocking aisles and fire escapes, all of the stock that is stored in racking will keep warehouse floors clears which is obviously of great benefit in case there are ever any emergency situations where staff need to exit the premises as quickly as possible.
Choosing the Right Racking Solution
There is a plethora of different options available for racking, and many warehouses tend to use a mixture of different solutions rather than opting for one only.
For example, a double-deep racking system is great for storing and grouping large quantities of the same kinds of stock, whereas drive-in racking systems promote an even greater efficient use of space for larger pallets. Some warehouses will even use shallow racks for small items that aren’t stored on pallets, and is typically what you might find in parts stores, for example.
