Industrial Shelving Transforms Capacity

Shelving Delivers 40% Increase in Capacity

Thistle Systems has enabled a worldwide distributor of veterinary supplies to transform the efficiency of its warehouse by replacing its existing pallet racking with Heavy Duty Industrial Shelving in their key picking area.

The company had previously been using pallet racking to store their products, however capacity was an issue with larger aisle widths required and the issue of dead space caused by broken pallets. The system was also causing picking issues with 6-10 products per picking location, resulting in pickers having to hunt for the required product.

After discussing the issues with the client, Thistle Systems used its Max the Cube approach to assess the alternatives and made the radical proposal to replace the existing pallet racking with 800mm deep longspan shelving with timber decking, accessed by a man up truck to pick products direct from the shelving.

The longspan shelving was almost 6 metres high with a maximum of 7 shelves high delivering over 1500 linear metres of shelving. Thistle maximised and optimised the design of the shelving to incorporate the structural roof beams in key areas of the warehouse to increase capacity by over 40%.

However the biggest improvement achieved by the solution has been on the picking process which has dramatically increased in efficiency with an estimated 2 hours saved per day within the first few weeks of usage.

Thistle Systems’ Sales Director, Alan Scott, said, “Our Max the Cube approach is totally focused on the concept of maximising capacity and dramatically reducing operational costs. By moving to shallower longspan shelving and reducing the aisle width, we have been able to deliver a sizable increase in capacity but more importantly a major increase in space utilisation.”

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What we did

• Over 1500 linear metres of long span shelving
• Storage Capacity increased by 40%
• Picking efficiency dramatically improved
• Estimated saving of 2 hours per day on picking
• Operational costs dramatically reduced