The forklift truck is a vital tool to help employees raise and move heavy weight materials and products with efficiency and speed without straining their bodies. How a business uses this machinery could significantly affect its productivity.
Free stacking pallets is the most popular storage method. Using this storage method is both economical and easy for your forklift. Free Stacking Pallets is positioning one pallet on top of another to create a stack of goods. This is a stable storage system and is suggested when dealing with numerous pallets of the same height and dimensions or large amounts of the similar product. The drawback of this particular method is that it just allows access to the things placed last, so it does not enable a First In First Out system.
It is essential to have a pallet racking technique that involves the stable storage of different sized pallets. Using a Last In First Out or First In First Out system, would allow for easy access of any pallet. It permits the rack to change shape and grow depending upon daily requirements. This technique needs aisles which are wide enough to allow a lift truck to maneuver easily and to freely access the racks. The disadvantage is that this method means fewer pallets can be handled within the setting. This may not make a difference if there is enough space available.
Like Pallet Racking, the method called Narrow Aisle Racking enables a Last In First Out or First In First Out technique. It differs in that a special narrow lift truck is utilized. This means that smaller spaces are necessary between the aisles of pallets than in the Pallet Racking method. The advantage is that much more goods can be kept in the same space. The disadvantage is that you would have to transition to a different kind of truck if you already own a regular lift truck. The expenditure of acquiring special machinery might be a deterrent to adopting this system of storage.
Using your lift truck to its fullest capability is vital as it pays to analyze your storage costs and retrieval costs of pallets. After that you can determine whether there are more efficient ways to utilize your forklift in order to increase the usable space of your units or to speed up the process. Greater effectiveness equals bigger productivity.