Creating Warehouse Shelving Designs – Tips and Ideas for an Efficient Warehouse

Tips To Designing Your Warehouse Storage

Having a safe, easy to access and suitably sized shelving system in your warehouse is essential for the streamlined operations of your business, so here are a few ideas about how to create efficient warehouse shelving designs.

Understand Your Company’s Storage Needs

The size and the volume of the items that you need to store on your shelves will determine the measurements of your shelving as well as the structure that works best in your warehouse. If the items that will be placed on your shelves are small and lightweight, you can use shelves of lower weight-bearing capacity and you can also make your shelving system taller, but if your items are bulky and heavy, your shelves are best made from strong material and they cannot rise very high.

Maximizing Storage Capacity

You also need to come up with an arrangement of shelves that maximizes capacity while also minimizing space usage. Placing your shelves in long rows, for example, is more efficient than having shorter bursts.

Easy Access and Easy Cleaning

The width of the aisles left between your rows of shelves is essential for streamlining the operations of your warehouse. If you plan to use large machines, such as forklifts to access the items on your shelves, make sure that the aisles are sufficiently large for your machines, otherwise you risk damaging your goods and your machines and accidents and injuries are also more likely to happen if the aisles are too narrow.

Designing a shelving system that is easy to get to is also essential for making it possible for your employees to clean the shelves easily. Spills happen all the time, causing material to build up quickly on the shelves and damaging the items in the area surrounding the spill, so fast and easy clean-up is very important for preserving the integrity of your inventories. Make sure that your shelves can be approached easily, use dividers and smaller containers wherever possible to make item removal and cleaning easy.

Include Scalability into the Design

Business growth usually comes with increased storage needs as well, so try to pay attention to that aspect when you create your shelving design. Try to use modular racking as much as you can – these solutions are freely adjustable, expandable and they add versatility to your warehouse shelving system.  To save money buy used pallet racking Denver companies sell eliminating high costs.

Use a Shelving Design Software

Nowadays, there are lots of software solutions that you can use for designing your warehouse shelving. There are lots of great websites that you can use free of charge and you can also find various design apps that are available for a fee. Try out some free solutions, read a few reviews of solutions that come for a fee, maybe try the demo versions of some of these programs and pick the one that you find the easiest to use. Whichever design software you pick, it will allow you to see what your design ideas look like in reality and many of the programs also provide help with load bearing capacity calculations.