I recently was asked to perform a study for a customer to evaluate the storage capacity of a few warehouses he was considering leasing.
The customer was curious to know what types of equipment would let him store more pallets in a 50,000 square foot space with 29 feet to the ceiling.
So I put together an analysis that yielded some interesting results which I published to our website. I thought this might be of interest to the group.
raymond-forklifts.com/maximize.html
What do you think? Were you surprised at the result?
Showing items 1 - 10 of 10 results.
with use of narrow aisle equipment can definitely add more pallets In case you if you are looking for FIFO or FILO system. use of pallet shuttle can definitely enhance your capacity. visit www.mhenext.com
Bill,
Articulated trucks are great but don't fall for the B.S.
A 1600mm aisle might be theoretically possible using sideshift and a bit of shunting but you are better to go for wider aisle for better efficiency and a truck that has the right shape like the Flexi which has no corners to hit the racking. Specified correctly with a good truck there is less damage and greater speed than with a reach truck. It is people trying to squeeze the aisles too tight that gets articulated a bad name. It is a good policy to use the BITA GN9 standard - i.e. 100mm clearance each side.
Hi,
Not quite true, the Flexi for one can lift two sandwich boxes to 6m- weighing at least 500kgs each - very big sandwiches indeed!
For a 50K sq. ft. warehouse this may not produce a very good ROI/ROA.
What about the new but accepted technology of aisle changing stacker cranes which provide full capacity to it's full height? Also very simple to be automated and save the labor.
I think what you all fail to take into account is the load at such heights what does the truck derate to for that height I could be wrong but i think flexi bendi and the like can lift a sandwich box oven 6 metres.
Dear Solutions,
It seems that you may be missing a point about maximising warehouse storage space by use of appropriate forklifts and that you may be unaware of the revolution going on with articulated (pivot steer) forklifts. These trucks, like the Bendi, Flexi and Aisle Master, can match any reach truck on lift height, i.e. up to 13 mt, but surpass them on aisle width needs. A Bendi, for example, can work safely in aisles only 1.6 mt wide compared with the typical 2.6 mt needed by any reach trucks and they can be fitted with double deep pantograph attachments.
Unlike VNA (very narrow aisle) trucks they do not need any form of rail or wire guidance and are much faster and more flexible, being able to work outside on rough ground. This means that they are very much cheaper to buy and run than dedicated VNA trucks. Their only limitation until now was that they did not offer man up capability. This has now been rectified by the recent British launch of an articulated man up Bendi.
The point to bear in mind with any warehouse project cost justification is not to consider only the densest storage acheivable but also the pallet productivity of the trucks in terms of pallets moved per hour. In this respect, articulated forklifts, owing to their greater versatility, are usually far more productive than reach and VNA trucks, which cannot work outside, as a rule, and need more space for manoeuvring at aisle ends.
Dear InventoryOps:
Due to greater stability and taller masts, the Reach truck is able to raise pallets higher than the standard 3 stage 83-187 mast on a sit down counterbalanced truck.
In my analysis, I was able to show greater storage density by adding extra levels in the racking and narrowing the aisles. (The RAYMOND reach truck can use as little as a 90" aisle, but I used a 102" clear aisle for my analysis).
Thanks for the feed back!
cough cough SPAM! cough cough SPAM! cough
Yes I was surprised at the result (and your math). I only really looked at the first comparison of a sit down counterbalanced to a stand-up counterbalanced and was surprised at how you got a 46.6% increase in storage just do to that. Since you didn't provide any additional details, I took a quick look at your drawing and it looks like it only shows a 10% increase in racking. So where did all those other pallet positions come from? Does the stand-up raymond have some new technology that allows you to open a porthole to an alternate universe where you can store more stuff?
By the way, just speaking for myself, I don't mind that you post a message letting us know that you put a little pallet storage converter program on your site, but going through the whole "I recently was asked to perform a study for a customer" stuff just makes you sound like all the other spammers out there. Hence the bit of attitude I'm giving here.
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