Insights

Gaining a competitive edge, improving safety, and increasing operational cost-savings through streamlined material handling solutions has been a challenge for logistics managers for decades. In the never ending search for storage and material handling solutions, many turn to suppliers for guidance. That’s when things can get murky.

Determining what the best material handling solutions are for your facility is dependent on multiple factors. Oftentimes, suppliers make inadequate recommendations, or they are focused more on their specific products versus what the best, long-term solution is for your company.

Inventory management can be enhanced with a dynamic and reliable FIFO system.

Businesses that don’t have an established FIFO storage method run the risk of bleeding money and operating inefficiently. For product-oriented businesses, a reliable FIFO system is of the utmost importance.

As one of four inventory accounting practices, the FIFO storage method assumes goods your company acquired first are sold, used, or disposed of first.

Unlike a standard pallet flow rack, deep lane pallet flow requires the collection of significantly more information to ensure a successful project. Here are a few points to keep in mind:

From time to time we get requests from our customers to use flowrack components (like wheels or rollers) in a pushback application. As we manufacture both flowrack and pushback systems we have a unique perspective on this relative to our pushback or flowrack only competition.

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?