Tips For Leveraging Space On Your Pallet Racks

By: Larry Rausch – Vice President of Sales and Marketing

After completing a client installation, we are often asked for tips that can help the customer leverage the space on their new pallet racking system. Maximizing space can go a long way in saving time and money.  This post is intended to provide useful tips on maximizing your overall storage capacity.

While a lot of warehouses are content to just place things on pallet racks and call it a day, we will show you that there is actually a lot you can do to maximize your existing pallet rack space and make sure everything is stored as carefully as possible.  In addition, if done properly, you can be assured there’s extra room in the warehouse for other goods as well.

Pallet Racks are one of the most useful types of warehouse shelving available thanks to their versatility and storage capacity—but are you using yours to their full potential?

If your warehouse relies on pallet racking to store items and you want to make sure your storage is being used as wisely as possible, take a look at our tips for leveraging your pallet racking space:

Make racks more mobile: For faster-moving products, it may be more worth it to move some inventory from your stationary pallet racks onto gravity flow racks to encourage product movement. This can help free up space on pallet racks for items that are accessed infrequently and may produce a ripple effect where handling times and product movement are improved through mobile storage.

Look for unused room space: It might not always be possible, but a good way to improve storage space and free up room elsewhere in an area is to look for lesser-used space in rooms. Try to make sure every corner has a rack in it, look for spaces between aisles that aren’t being utilized, and don’t be afraid to think outside the box – look over doors, under mezzanines and in other areas that might not be the most common spot for pallet racks.

Reduce aisle space: One of the best ways to maximize the space around your pallet racks is to reduce the width of aisles between them. Many warehouse aisle widths are determined by guidelines put forth by forklift manufacturers, local safety regulations, and the like, but in a lot of cases for pallet racks you can reduce these widths to the minimum required size to increase the amount of warehouse shelving you can include while maintaining a steady traffic flow.

Reconsider their usage: A lot of warehouses use pallet racks for standard daily tasks like picking or shipping/receiving, but in many cases you can actually repurpose some of your less-populated racks for case flow and/or full-carton processing instead of individual item picks. This obviously depends on a lot of factors such as inventory density and carton flow, but if you have pallet racks with room to spare, converting them to overflow storage and using smaller shelves for daily picking could help make the most of your available space.

Use safety panels to set limits: Pallet rack safety panels are a good call in general to protect your workers and your inventory from accidents, but they can also help better measure the amount of product currently on a shelf by providing a hard backstop against which product can sit and act as a guide to how much space you still have to use.

Conclusion

Leveraging your storage space for your pallet racking systems can be driven by making racks more mobile and such other things as reducing your aisle space. Maximizing space is the hidden gem in saving you time and money.

We hope this post provided you helpful information as it relates to understandinghow best to leverage your pallet racking storage space. To speak with one of our technical experts, please call 1-216-229-9300. And thank you for reading our post.