Rack/Shelving: Laying the groundwork for growth

The thinking around racks right now centers on two familiar concepts: Safety practices and risk mitigation are not nice-to-haves, they are must-haves; and solution development. New seismic standards have gotten plenty of attention lately, but experts agree unanimously that the overall enforcement landscape is much stricter. And, judging from the state of safety practices surrounding maintenance and reconfiguration of racks inside many facilities, this is a very good thing.

Aside from enforcement, the need to increase efficiency is changing the way racks are designed. The combined pressures erode commoditization of rack systems, since the number of storage locations, aisle width and slab designs provide nowhere near enough information to properly specify a storage system.

Will the storage be archival and expected to hold loads for a long time, or will there be lift trucks buzzing around accessing it all the time? To boost safety, achieve compliance and cut costs, the design of racks and storage media must match the application as closely as possible.

“Successful rack users start with the rack system when designing any new facility,” says Al Boston, owner of AK Materials Handling. “If a main part of your business is storage and handling, you should consider the rack before you even start with the building. But many people still try to fit the rack to the building. It’s like buying a sports car and then asking your wife and kids to get in. You should have bought a minivan.”

Then again, the sports car might someday make sense. With an eye toward flexibility, rack users are evaluating what the storage can do to make processes, people and equipment more effective now and in the future.

Structured safety
For now, there’s some catching up to do. “We see things that frankly would turn your stomach in terms of the condition of rack, hasty reconfigurations, no load capacity signage and abuse,” says Steve Rogers, vice president of Hannibal Industries. “That should keep both the operations and executive sides of the house awake at night.”

Those camps often have different agendas, where one wants to invest and the other prefers to spend as little as possible, but safety is a good way to bring them together. Once teamed up, many will not have to look far for critical improvements. John Krummell, president of Advance Storage Products, offers an analogy. “If you saw a truck with a bad tire, you wouldn’t hesitate to change it because you know it’s a safety issue,” he says. “Now if you see rack with dents and dings you say, ‘well, it hasn’t fallen over yet so it must be OK.’”

The scenario is even found in large, sophisticated operations with cash on hand. Krummell said it took two years to convince one big account it needed a formal rack safety program. A related benefit of such a program is to support changes in rack systems. As SKUs, slots, loads and equipment change, a fine-tuned storage system should be able to adapt accordingly. That nimbleness is good for regulatory compliance, but should also improve productivity and efficiency.

In fact, Boston suggests the pursuit of efficiency got jumbled up along the way with the idea of rack as a sturdy 30-year fixture. “Years ago, much of it was probably over-engineered, which was good and conservative,” he says. “Lately, efforts to drive out costs have produced rack products that might occasionally have verged on too cheap.”

Instead of over-paying for robust beams or creating massive safety risks with inadequate ones, best practices closely match racks to the application. But again, applications change. “Across the industry, there seems to be more emphasis on rapid order fulfillment,” says Dave Olson, national sales and marketing manager for Ridg-U-Rak. “Top distributors have raised the bar and retailers and consumer product companies are playing catch-up in an attempt to fill online orders or get closer to 48-hour cycles.”

This grows the diversity of storage systems going into large DCs, Olson says, as they work to increase inventory turns and justify rack systems for the various types of products and how they ship. These pressures have a substantial impact on operations with either relatively new or aging systems.

“When you first set up your facility for pallet storage, it worked fine,” Krummell explains. “But demand has changed slowly over time. One of your customers says they want rainbow pallets. You handle it, if not very well, then another customer asks, then half your customers, and soon the whole thing is in chaos.”

This is when rack users, in a well-meaning effort to keep up, might take it upon themselves to modify racks in questionable ways. “We design to a specific set of specifications, and everything is interconnected,” says Olson. “If you start taking beams out and moving things around, you could be affecting the load carrying capacity.”

Regulatory aftershocks
The current code enforcement environment is less likely to overlook such modifications. Boston says that in just the last five years things have become much stricter around the country.

“Years ago racks were designed for one of five seismic zones. It was a more generic, broad technique,” Olson says. “Now virtually every zip code, almost every street address, has different requirements. The U.S. Geological Survey and various code enforcement bodies have defined it so that there might be different parameters for facilities a block apart.”

Seismic concerns often prompt further scrutiny of rack design, but there are some common misconceptions. Rack designed for earthquake resistance does not always mean a more rigid structure, Olson suggests, and in fact might be more flexible. An impact from a lift truck can do a significant amount of damage to any rack. And, even though the impact load is localized, it can cause a collapse where an earthquake would not.

Even if an operation aimed to replace an entire existing rack system with an identical, blemish-free one, grandfather clauses can’t shield it from new regulations.

“With increased safety awareness and permitting requirements becoming more stringent, it’s getting harder for people to just go and change their existing racking systems,” Krummell says. “A customer might call and say they have a 15-year-old system, want to change it and can’t because of codes. It puts the customer in a tough place.”

This is especially shocking when a customer has already bought a building or poured a slab. Krummell says most of Advance’s business is building to a specification, but more and more customers are pursuing earlier involvement with rack suppliers. “We’re working with customers to lay out facilities, develop the best solution, and work with suppliers of conveyors and other equipment to prove the flow of a given module,” Krummell says. “That trend will continue.”

Racks, shelves and a seat at the table
Between codes and the desire for optimum efficiency and productivity, rack systems benefit from a detailed exchange of information throughout a given project. Boston emphasizes the importance of visualizing the application, not merely the size, shape and location of storage.

“If I don’t know what the purpose and mission of a storage system are, it’s hard to match it with expectations,” Boston says. “If the goal is minimal rack material and standard usage for five to seven years, I will design it much differently than if the system will need maximum usage for 30 years. In addition to knowing we need 500 pallet locations for 2,000-pound pallets, we should consider if it is an archival application or will be accessed very often with people and equipment working around it all day long.”

The increased use of automation also demands more collaboration between solution providers. Rogers says automation typically requires precision in rack design, with tolerances much finer than conventional systems. As an added bonus, Rogers says automated systems often improve seismic resistance by creating a denser cube structure instead of a series of independent aisles.

For example, one customer project in Bakersfield, Calif., was located right on a fault line. Rogers says the customer had planned to pour a 10-inch, fully reinforced slab. Instead, after a holistic assessment of the system, the customer ended up needing only an 8-inch, regular-reinforced slab.

“The math worked out in a way that was more efficient than guesswork or adjustments after the fact,” Rogers says. “Customers are doing a much better job of getting suppliers, integrators and consultants involved from the get-go. But we still get calls from people who want rack next week, where probably not much thought went into that.”

Balancing density and accessibility
In the case of retrofits, most are characterized by increased diversity of storage media tailored to various SKU and order profiles. Krummell says about 90% of his business has historically been deep storage pallet rack. “We’re seeing now that the customers of our customers are demanding they change how they distribute,” Krummell says. “They want pallets split up, and some orders are individual cases or even eaches.”

One customer using aged density pushback rack sought to ship to stores while reducing held inventory. “They had been trying to pick eaches out of high-density pushback,” Krummell recalls. “Pushback doesn’t support case picking very well, or each picking at all.”

The customer reconfigured the existing rack to include storage for pallets, high-density case storage, carton flow and shelving for each picks. The changes resulted in a 30% increase in productivity.”

Ed Granger, director of sales for Quantum Storage Systems, says the trend of each picking, combined with lean methodologies in production applications, has led to an “explosion” in wire shelving business. “It’s blown our historical averages out of the water,” Granger says. “We still have customers that might spend six figures and then we don’t hear from them for years, but nearly one in five customers comes back monthly or weekly to make adjustments.”

As these companies reform storage space, the surrounding processes inform shelving systems, Granger says. “We’re seeing lots of product on wheels, since the mobility factor for these companies is huge,” he says. “They are focused on achieving speed and growth.”

The landscape changes by the minute, it seems, and storage systems have had to adapt more rapidly in recent years than in previous decades. Rack technology moves a lot slower than other parts of industry like software and automation, but Boston says he welcomes the new challenges.

“Some might say it’s not like the good old days, but I really like where things are going. These are the good days,” Boston says. “I haven’t seen it going any better than this.” 

Companies mentioned in this article
• Advance Storage Products
• AK Materials Handling
• Hannibal Industries
• Quantum Storage Systems
• Ridg-U-Rak
• Steel King