The lift truck is a vital machinery to help employees raise and transport heavy weight materials and goods with speed and efficiency without straining their bodies. How a company makes use of this tool can considerably affect its productivity.
A popular storage technique is Free Stacking Pallets. This is a way to utilize your lift truck which is easy and economical. Free Stacking Pallets is placing one pallet over another to create a stack of goods. This is a stable storage system and is suggested when dealing with many pallets of similar dimensions and height or large amounts of the similar goods. The drawback of this method is that it just enables access to the objects placed last, so it does not enable a First In First Out system.
Pallet Racking is a technique that involves the stable storage of various sized pallets. Any pallet could be accessed at any time, that allows a Last In First Out or First In First Out method. It enables the rack to change shape and grow depending upon every day needs. This particular system needs aisles which are wide enough to enable a forklift to freely access the racks and easily maneuver. The downside is that this specific technique means fewer pallets can be handled in the environment. This might not matter if there is enough space available.
Narrow aisle racking is like pallet racking in that it enables for a Last In First Out or First In First Out technique. The difference in the method is how the special narrow lift truck is utilized. This means that smaller areas are necessary between the aisles of pallets than in the Pallet Racking technique. The advantage is that much more product can be kept in the same space. The downside is that you would have to transition to a new truck if you already own a typical forklift truck. The expenditure of obtaining special machines might be a deterrent to adopting this technique of storage.
Utilizing your forklift to its fullest capability is important since it pays to analyze your storage costs and retrieval costs of pallets. Then you could determine whether there are more effective ways to use your forklift to increase the usable space of your units or to accelerate the process. Greater efficiency equals greater productivity.