Efficient Storage In Daily Life

If you use pallet racking in your warehouse , you know what a wonderful tool it can be to keep everything in order. Pallet racking is built to support heavy amounts of products and to keep up with the major demands of a warehouse. But much like a home or a car, pallet racking needs to be taken care of and maintained to stay in good working condition. If your pallet racking becomes damaged, it might not be as structurally sound as it once was and there’s a chance for someone to be seriously hurt or killed. Pallet racking should be inspected regularly to make sure racks are level, feet are sitting evenly on the ground and securely anchored, fasteners are secured, uprights and load beams are not bent, and there are no general signs of damage such as dents, splits, or nicks in the paint. Rust is another important thing to watch for, particularly in high humidity environments and places where chemicals are stored, since it can weaken the metal. If you have forklifts or other motorized ve...

Improper racking is a critical issue that businesses face in their storage operations today. Improper racking can lead to product damage, and in the worst case scenarios, bodily injury or loss of life to your employees. Rack accidents usually occur because of impact from lift trucks, improper installation and maintenance, or overloading the racks. It’s important to understand how you will be using your racks when you order them, because the best way to avoid any issues with your racks is to use one that’s suited for your needs. By taking the necessary steps to ensure the survival of your pallet racks, and the safety of your employees, you can avoid any costly accidents. Here are some Pallet Racking Safety Tips you can use today: Place the load squarely – You should train your drivers to deposit pallets properly on the rack beams; square and evenly overlapping on the front and back. Don’t Exceed Rack Capacity – This is a common issue, it’s important to keep documentation of the loa...

A dirty and disorganized warehouse is an unproductive one. How you maintain your working environment not only effects the efficiency and safety of your workers, but how your company is perceived by others. Enforcing cleaning rules within your facility will help maintain organization and develop pride within your team. Follow these tips to get started: 1. Create a Schedule While giving your warehouse a deep cleaning once a year is helpful, it does not create consistency. Assess your facility and decide which areas need to be cleaned and monitored daily, and the other areas that are only in need of weekly or monthly upkeep. Create a calendar and guidelines for workers to follow. 2. Clean As You Work It’s very important to have cleaning tasks scheduled each day, but many messes can be prevented by simply cleaning as you go. If there is a department that uses a lot of packaging, be sure there are plenty of garbage cans around so nothing ends up on the floor. If your company uses mac...

In a place as fast-moving as the warehouse , keeping inventory organized and easy to access cannot be stressed enough. If your warehouse is unable to keep things moving along quickly and efficiently, it could result in bottlenecks and a failure to ship on time. Due to the volatile nature of warehousing, it’s important to defend against these random fluctuations by incorporating storage techniques year-round. Follow these strategies below for optimal warehouse efficiency. Rearrange Warehouse Layout Looking from an overhead point of view, decide on the positioning of your storage units that will promote the greatest efficiency. Gauge which  pallet racks,  mezzanines, wire shelving, and other types of storage units will best benefit material handling and flow of shipments. By consistently striving for ways to optimize storage layout, your warehouse is bound for faster shipping and greater organization. Not sure which storage unit is the best fit for your warehous...

Although storing goods isn’t normally too physically demanding of a task,  it doesn’t mean there aren’t precautions to take while doing it. For both the home and warehouse alike, there are many improper storage techniques that could result in a thrown-out back or possibly even worse outcomes. As leading manufacturers of a wide array of storage devices for multiple locations, Shelving is experienced in what it takes to safely handle and store materials. Below we’ve provided some key safety tips to bear in mind. Evaluate Access Point Before picking up a good, your first main consideration should be where the good is presently placed. If it’s positioned atop a tall out-of-reach storage space, like a five-shelf  wire shelving unit, you run the risk of accidentally dropping the package on your head and increase your chances of dropping and damaging it. Resolve to find a ladder so that when you go to pick it up, you can avoid clumsily reaching for it above your head and inste...

Warehouse safety is a big concern for everyone working in a facility, from the plant managers to the floor personnel and everyone in between. And while there’s plenty of information out there about how to keep your employees and materials safe from injury or harm, we’ve compiled a few tips that might get overlooked or aren’t as well-known among workers: Practice Careful Stacking A sadly common source of accidents is due to improper stacking of materials. Different methods of stacking are best used for items of varying shapes, such as block stacking which keeps items in a cube shape (often fastened together with zipties or shrink wrap), or brick stacking which turns subsequent items 90 degrees while being stacked to prevent accidental falls. Irregularly-shaped items could be stacked with a sheet of plywood between them to add additional support Install Safety Panels While many similar safety methods exist for keeping people from getting hurt on exposed machinery or anything...

Budgeting. No matter what industry you work in or what kind of warehouse you manage, the idea of yearly budgets is bound to creep up on you soon, if it hasn’t already. And while we here at Shelving.com are doing everything we can to help with this year’s budget with our Blow Out Your Budget sale, we also wanted to try and compile some tips to help you prepare for next year as well. While not all of these tips will help for every single company or every single budget, we feel like these strategies will come in pretty handy no matter what you do: Your Budget Is Your Friend Before you even get down to the nitty gritty, remember this: your budget is there to help. Even if you find yourself bumping up against it, the reason you have a budget is to make things as easy as possible for your business. Try not to consider it a burden, and it will make any of the decisions you have to make for your warehouse that much easier. Determine Projected Sales or Revenue The first step, once y...

Fittingly so, considering the number of items it has to contain and the constant flow of products in and out, one of the hardest areas of any retail space, factory, or warehouse to keep clean and organized is the stockroom. There’s items of all sizes and shapes to hang on to, and sometimes it can get a little too overwhelming. If you need some help keeping your stock room cleaned up and properly arranged, we’ve got a few tips here to get started: Make A Good Floor Plan: Even more so than a lot of other areas of your retail space, making a clean and thought-out floor plan for your stockroom will help in a number of ways. Providing your employees enough room to walk and navigate the stockroom will help them remember where items are located and allow them to quickly get to the items they need without causing a traffic jam or having to get around a lot of excess fixtures. Nothing is worse than making a customer wait for an employee to be able to find something in the stockroom, and a ...

No matter how needed and important they may be, safety audits are always a big investment of time and energy to make sure they’re done correctly. A good safety audit will encompass every aspect of your facility and warehouse, making sure that workers on any shift, in any department, can perform their duties safely and effectively. But even for smaller facilities, this process could take a long time. If you need some help planning out your workplace’s next upcoming safety audit, we’ve got a few tips here to help get your team and facility ready: Know What You’re Investigating A good starting place for any warehouse safety audit is to know your goals, and what you need to inspect. Safety audits tend to go farther than a safety inspection in that they both investigate physical installations inside a workplace and also checking things like work processes, previous results of safety inspections, and so on. Before you begin a safety audit, you should take some time to really final...

Anyone who has managed a warehouse for any length of time has encountered the need for extra floor space. Workers need space to work and transport goods, inventory needs space to be properly arranged, and it’s always been very easy for a factory or plant to start feeling cramped. It might sound counter-intuitive, but one of the most effective ways to restore floor space in your warehouse is to bring in new installations, industrial storage solutions, and other tools and shelving options. Yes, this sounds like the old “making a mess to clean a mess” conundrum, but sometimes a good warehouse overhaul is just the thing you need to restore lost workspace and maximize efficiency. Here’s a few modifications to consider if you find yourself running out of space: In-plant offices: Many times, the first place to start with freeing up plant space is to start designating different areas for certain services – shipping and receiving, inventory overflow, and so on. If you have any on-the-f...

It seems like things move awfully fast in the world of warehouse management at times. New management software, innovations in industrial storage , and changes in staffing procedure can mean times of big adaption and upheaval for your facility, shop, or warehouse. But even in this changing landscape, there’s a few tried-and-true methods of warehouse management and inventory control that are just as handy now as they ever were. If you’re in the midst of overhauling your warehouse’s operations and procedures, here’s a few methods and areas you might want to keep around: Take a Picture: Ever since the first time someone needed to remember what was in a specific box, digital pictures have come in handy to remember what was in a box, and how it was arranged initially. In a busy warehouse a certain box can get accessed dozens of times a day, and the odds that everything will be put back correctly aren’t in your favor. Take a reference photo of whatever was in a certain box or storage ...