Insights

We all bring our bias to a warehouse layout design project – forklift people are thinking about aisle size and throughput, rack people about structural versus roll formed or selective rack versus double deep versus pushback and conveyor people talking about pick modules, sortation equipment and the like.

Customers also bring their preferences to the table, the most common one being “We have always done it this way and we just want some more of the same”. But if we are going to design the right warehouse layout, there are two key elements that must be looked at right from the start – a) what is the inventory that we are going to store, and b) how does it come in, move through the warehouse and ship out?

As one of the original founding partners of 3D, people often ask me how it all started. Like many things in life, it was a collection of circumstances that all came together at the right time.

Back in 1991, Todd Scott, Tony Evers and I all worked at Interroll Canada. Todd was Sales Manager for Dynamic Storage Products (Pushback, Pallet Flow, Carton Flow), Tony was VP of production and I wore the design/sales hat. At the time Interroll Canada was a franchise. The owner sold the franchise back to Interroll Corporate in Switzerland, Corporate sent in a new president, the recession of 1991-2 hit, and Todd and Tony found themselves unemployed.

3D does not offer rubber bumpers as a standard option on our pushback systems. The reason for this is two-fold:

1. Rubber bumpers are sold as “noise reducers.”
While these bumpers do in fact reduce noise, when properly loading and unloading pushback lanes, you cannot hear the carts over the sounds of even an electric forklift. Furthermore, if an operator unloads a lane improperly (ie. too fast) creating a “bang”, we think it’s a good idea if other staff/management nearby know, so that they can remind the driver that he is to control the loads when emptying the lane.

Two ongoing trends have been causing headaches for warehouses utilizing bulk storage or drive-in racking – the first is the move to lighter packaging, and the second relates to ever increasing product types (SKU) with smaller and smaller lot sizes.

With lighter packaging, products that were once able to be stacked 3 or 4 high may now only be able to be stacked two high, or not stacked at all. Facilities that have large sections of bulk storage are finding their height utilization severely restricted, and may end up storing half of what they used to store in a given area.

Most of you know that 3D does not manufacture racking; we only manufacture pushback, pallet flow and carton flow components to fit into somebody else’s rack structure.