CTI Education: Warehouse Racking
For the first week of Conveyor Tech’s Education section, we’ll be focusing on the various styles of warehouse shelving you might want to utilize for your warehouse.
Depending on what you’re trying to store, how readily available you need your product to be, and the variety of items to be stored, you’ll want a combination of specific storage solutions to suit your needs.
Cantilever Racking
Cantilever Racking is perfect if you’re storing long, irregular shapes that won’t fit easily on a pallet. Lengths of pipe, lumber and other miscellany are excellent uses of this type of rack.
Standard Selective Racking
Standard Selective Racking
Single Deep Warehouse Racking
This is the most common type of racking you will see at places like Home Depot and Lowe’s (and perhaps Costco or Sam’s Club). Standard Selective Racking has many easily accessible faces, and so is the best storage solution for storing a large variety of items.
The downsides to Standard Selective Racking is that it requires significantly more aisles than the options which follow. It is therefore relatively low density.
Double Deep Warehouse Shelving
This is largely the same as the Single Deep option, but is slightly more dense. Because of this, fewer aisles are required to take up floor space.
However, using double deep instead of single deep rack will require the user to be a bit more organized than they would otherwise have to be.
Drive Racking
Drive In Warehouse Racking
This variety of racking is the most dense possible. However, the tradeoff of this is that organization is crucial with this. Only one type of material should be stored in each aisle, because once the first pallet is entered, it cannot be retrieved until each subsequent pallet is removed. Whatever you put in first, you’ll be getting out last.
Drive Thru Warehouse Racking
This is largely the same as Drive In racking, with the only difference being that, while Drive In backs up to a wall, Drive Thru leaves both ends open. Because of this, it is only slightly less dense than Drive In.
Flow Rack
Pallet Flow
This is largely the same as Drive In racking, with the added feature of utilizing wheels which allow the first pallet to be placed at the beginning of the run and slide down to the end without needing to drive all the way down.
Carton Flow Systems
This should be used for smaller boxes, and can be useful in creating a pick line for shipping.
If you’re interested in optimizing your storage space, our engineers can give you the customized industrial storage solutions you need.