In order to purchase the correct storage and racking solutions for your home or business you will usually want to compare different suppliers in order to ensure that you can find a suitable solution for your needs. If extending an existing arrangement, you will want to ensure that you receive the appropriate level of service at the right price. The balance between service and price will not be the same for every customer though so cheapest isn’t necessarily best.
Buying online, or at least viewing a retailers online catalogue will typically provide far greater levels of information that a visit to a retailer operating out of a store. Shelving, racking and storage cabinets take up so much space that physical displays are rarely going to be extensive enough to help form an accurate opinion of what is the very best solution for your needs. With this in mind, it pays to do your homework online before deciding to visit a supplier.
Online catalogues may open your mind to a whole world of storage solutions that could offer very real benefits to your company. Unless you are an expert in shelving and racking, it is highly likely that other people will have devised storage solutions that you yourself may not be aware of, despite their suitability for your needs.
You need to identify a supplier that is able to assist you in finding readymade solutions for your needs and also one with the expert knowledge to modify a standard arrangement to meet your unique requirements.
Racking and shelving plays a part in almost everybody’s lives be it directly or indirectly. Anybody whose life is untouched by shelving is most likely living either a monastic or a back to basics existence. The benefits of shelving are many but fundamentally it enables spaces to be used effectively and possessions or stock items to be stored in a manner that enables easy access.
Shelving is used in many different settings such as libraries which provide easy access to a fairly regularly sized product or in a warehouse environment where a huge variety of differently sized and shaped products may be stored under one roof. Some shelving and racking systems may rely largely on visual cues to enable access to the correct products such as in a supermarket whilst many modern warehouses will position products in what may appear a completely random order. A modern warehouse can actually handle a totally random pattern of products as products are identified by shelf references rather than the seemingly identical cardboard boxes being stored in location after location. In reality, the most modern warehouse will be meticulously planned to minimise picking times and to aid computer controlled picking routes for either manual picking or robot picking.
For these types of processes to work, shelving must be available in a range of different styles and sizes to facilitate cost effective storage and picking solutions. When looking to buy racking or shelving, online suppliers are frequently able to demonstrate the most comprehensive selection of solutions.
Racking and shelving are commonly the best method for organising and storing goods either for easy access or to simply maximise the available space. Occasionally, a racking solution that performs a specific function does not actually make the optimum use of space from a maximum storage capacity but it may make item or product selection simpler. Shops probably represent the most widespread examples of racking and shelving that balances the need to maximise space with the need to make products easily identifiable and accessible.
A trip to just one shop will reveal a surprising array of storage solutions from straightforward shelving of many different sizes to display racks for hanging packs of batteries and the typical assorted knick knacks that you never realise you can’t live without until you stop to look at them. Should you venture behind the scenes in the same shop, you will inevitably discover further racking and shelving solutions that are aimed at higher volume and heavier duty storage where the balance between volume and accessibility of storage shifts in favour of maximising volume.
What this demonstrates is the need for many different types of shelving and racking in one setting. Whilst shops are probably more dependent on storage racking than some other environments, it does demonstrate how there is no one simple one size fits all solution to shelving and racking. When buying racking, it helps to use a supplier that can provide a product selection that covers many of these different racking solutions. Commonly online sellers can conveniently demonstrate broad ranges.
Selecting the correct shelving for your needs may not appear to be a difficult task but there are many considerations that may either make you very happy with your purchase or leave you thinking you could have selected a better option. Most shelving or racking purchases will fulfil your immediate needs if you have carefully thought about them and planned accordingly. The aspect that may potentially get overlooked is that of future proofing your purchase.
Whether racking is being purchased for an industrial purpose or decorative shelving is being purchased for the home or office environment, some thought about how that environment is likely to evolve may have a large influence on your purchase. Typically, modular racking systems will provide the capacity to extend and increase your available racking over time as your storage needs increase. It is logical to buy a shelving system that can be expanded both upwards and in terms of strength to handle the heavier and fuller pallets that you now need to store.
The aesthetically designed shelf may not need to be expanded in its own right but it may need to be replicated in other rooms at a later date and to do so needs to be a style that will be readily available in the future. Racking solutions with standardised fittings ensure that you have much more opportunity to modify the utilisation of a racking system as layouts and purposes of workspaces change. New innovative storage ideas are also far more likely to be compatible with standard fittings such as slat wall.
Buying shelving is not a difficult task; buying good shelving is also a fairly straightforward process but sometimes buying the best possible shelving for your needs requires access to a bit more information than any bricks and mortar retailer may be able to provide. Buying the best solution for shelving isn’t simply a case of buying the highest quality of manufacture. Obviously, you will have your own budgetary stipulations which may influence product selections but the emphasis here is not on comparing two different qualities of racking that fulfil the same purpose. The emphasis here is that there are many different types of racking and storage solutions that may afford you a storage solution that can provide real ease of use for your home or for the business consumer realise significant cost efficiencies.
A good example of an excellent storage solution is one such as a carousel in a corner cupboard. Corner cupboards typically provide a large space of which a significant proportion is effectively unreachable and therefore wasted. A carousel provides a method for putting goods into this dead space without the need for contorting yourself to reach them.
A further good example is the wall racking used in a workshop to store tools. It is undeniable that a tool box could store more tools in a smaller space than a wall rack but whilst tool boxes have their place in the workshop, a neatly arranged tool rack provides hands on accessibility to the right tool with no hunting. Online retailers may be able to present far more creative racking solutions than any physical retailer.
Warehouse racking systems are designed to accommodate large volumes of goods on either pallets or in a loose stored way. These are typically designed to be modular systems so that the shelving can extend to great heights where necessary and can easily be extended should you business need to expand storage at a later date. The variable height for shelves also means that space can be utilised in many different ways. Even with palletised goods it is possible that some goods will be stored on smaller pallets than others. It would be a foolish waste of space to use a fixed height shelf separation if many goods are stored on much smaller pallets than others.
Installing warehouse racking does benefit from forward thinking. Modular systems do provide the facility to amend the shelving arrangements in your business but, a business that is forever re-arranging shelving due to poor initial planning is potentially wasting a lot of effort.
Ideally your goods will be stored in your warehouse so that the most commonly used goods are quickly accessible whilst the occasionally used items, or goods in storage, are utilising the space in the darkest recesses of the warehouse. Some computer controlled warehouses may have detailed workflow reports and analysis tools that can arrange goods for them to maximise efficiencies in the picking operation. Even the most simple of systems that relies on human management will quickly make it evident that storing the most commonly used item in the furthest corner of the warehouse, simply because it was the only location to take a 6 foot tall pallet, was a mistake.
Small shelves can be used for displaying small and delicate ornaments or they can be dozens of feet high holding seemingly endless pallets in a warehouse location. For such a simple object, a shelf truly does appear in a hugely varied number of ways.
Shelves are very simple structures and yet similarly to the wheel, our lives would be very different without them. The ability to store things using vertical space enables us to utilise so much more of the living or work space around us. Even a chaotically organised shelf will enable things to be lifted off the floor for either simple convenience to not be a trip hazard or for practical reasons to make something safer by being out of the way of children or animals for example.
A well organised shelf enables us to access the items we want quickly and conveniently. A book shelf provides quick visibility of the available reading material. A huge warehouse may not facilitate simple item selection through a quick glance but a well organised warehouse with documented storage will enable similarly rapid product selection. The use of automated order picking in robot operated warehouses is only possible through the use of organised shelving. Robot technology may be good but it does not work with uncoordinated clutter, shelving is the route to organised goods storage. It is probably not the case that the shelves populating your own environment are religiously organised to the extent that a robot could find what it needed but, you would surely be lost without the organisation they facilitate.
Racking and shelving are so commonplace in both our domestic and work lives that we pay little attention to them. Despite this low profile in our consciousness, shelves can add great character to a room or transform the functionality of a room by enhancing the organisation of your living or workspace. A library is only truly a library when books are neatly arranged on shelves in an easily accessible manner. Without shelving, a library is simply a book depository. An office without shelving will typically be either a paperless one or more likely, untidy.
Shelving comes in many different forms with some being heavy duty whilst some is decorative. Despite the many varieties there are two basic types, which are wall shelving and free standing shelving. Wall shelving is attached to a wall and is probably more common in the domestic environment where most rooms will have load bearing walls and there is typically not a major requirement for high volume storage solutions or significant load bearing on a large scale. Free standing shelving benefits the work environment where a combination of high volume storage, heavy weights and a less common existence of structural walls necessitates self contained storage solutions.
When purchasing shelving for a specific purpose it is beneficial to choose a vendor that has a broad range of solutions to choose from. This is equally important whether you are selecting based on aesthetic or practical considerations. As few bricks and mortar suppliers are able to demonstrate abroad range of solutions buying online will frequently provide access to the best variety.
Shelving and racking is available for many different purposes such as domestic and industrial settings. Even within one of these settings, there is a broad range of the types of shelving used. An industrial setting may be for archive storage that needs to be accessible to a person using a kick stool whilst another may be pallet racking with a requirement to extend some 40 or so feet vertically whilst also supporting much heavier loads.
A need for a racking or shelving solution may typically also be accompanied by a requirement for additional storage extras such as boxes, trays or fittings that will provide a customisable and bespoke shelving solution for your particular needs.
When sourcing a shelving or racking solution it is beneficial to identify suppliers that offer a broad range of solutions. This will typically enable you to compare the many different specifications that are available and to also see examples of storage solutions that you may not have considered.
If you are simply looking to extend or replicate an existing racking solution that works for you already then a supplier with a broad range may be sufficient for your needs. Perhaps where a market leading supplier is able to offer most benefit is in new solutions. You may well have some very good or even creative ideas about how to best accomplish your aims. No matter how good these ideas may be, it may prove unnecessary to re-invent the wheel. A large supplier may have already found a solution that you have not considered. An existing solution is quite possibly more cost effective.
Racking is extremely useful for maximising available space for either storage or display purposes or a combination of both. This extends from simple domestic shelving to more heavy duty shelving units, right through to commercial racking for warehouse facilities and pretty much everything in between.
The different types of racking available are almost as extensive as the choice of suppliers for racking and shelving solutions. If you were to stop and consider a world without shelving and racking, both your home and work environments would quite possibly look very different. Racking is commonly used in the workplace for document storage and warehousing. To imagine either of these activities without racking would lead to stacks of boxes and document folders littered over endless valuable square feet of floor space. At home, the capacity and convenience of the modest bookcase may soon be realised when the books are stacked in boxes on the floor.
Racking and shelving is a commodity product that fulfils so many different needs, many of which are exclusively practical whilst others are primarily aesthetic. As a result, these types of products are widely available in both furniture and DIY stores in addition to wholesale suppliers of such fixtures and fittings.
Considerations to be mindful of when purchasing any shelving system are whether the system is easily extendable. This could be the need to extend and existing unit upwards or along in the case of a functional warehousing setting or in the case of domestic shelving it may be the advantage of being able to purchase units that are complementary to existing furniture.