One of my first projects at Advanced Chemical was to help with their drum storage area in the main warehouse. This is what the warehouse space looked like on a day to day basis. Not only is this a disaster to look at, but it was downright dangerous when routes of egress were blocked by pallets full of four 300-500 pound drums. Whenever inventory needed to be done for a shipment overseas, the forklift operator had to remove every single pallet from the warehouse, and walk around the drums reading the labels on the top until they knew they had everything they needed. Then they had move them back into the warehouse into two groups, one of drums that were staying, and one of drums to be loaded onto the next 16 wheeler. This was a huge waste of time and was one of the most inefficient processes at the company.
This is the layout of the warehouse that we worked with everyday. The area in the middle was always completely full of drums which blocked one of the means of egress on the top right of the image. It was up to me to re-evaluate the options for storage, and come up with the most compact and intelligent storage system possible.
This I beam was one of the most annoying parts of this project. It couldn’t be removed without expensive adaptation of the existing support structure of the building so we had to build the storage system around it. With the help of computer aided design, we were able to build it into the model and use it as a reference point to build the racks around.
This is the design that I came up with to fit as many drums as possible in the warehouse while still being able to access every rack with our forklift. The racks chosen are called “Push-Back-Racks” because the pallets were on sleds and would push back as soon as another pallet was loaded into the opening. Once a pallet was removed, the next one would roll forward. The openings on the racks are denoted by where the drum pallet is shown. The design included five racks that were 2 deep, three pallets that were 3 deep, and 1 stand-alone rack in the corner. The stand alone is skewed to allow access with the forklift
What made this system great was that now we could stack the pallets 3 high, which was too unsteady when the pallets were sitting directly onto drums of differing heights. While the non-rack packing was more efficient horizontally, the ability to use the unused vertical space proved to increase our capacity. Because the ceiling height was only about 14 feet from the gas line on the ceiling, I had to be in constant communication with the racking company in order to create a custom system for our facility. Accounting for the incline of the sleds on the top level, even the tallest 55 gallon drum was still about 10” away from the bottom of the gas line.
Second view. In this model, the racks are shown with a double stack on the bottom, and a single top position. This was the initial plan in order to save as much veritcal space as possible. With help from the company, we were able to have 3 independent levels while remaining safely below the gas line. This double stack method was only kept for the stand alone rack in the corner due to the garage door tracks being so much lower than the ceiling.
After Installation
This and the following photos show the racks on the first day after installation. We decided not to place anything on the third level for the first few weeks in order to get the proper safety materials and procedures squared away.
These 3 racks could store enough for 2 full truck loads and were designated material that could be shipped. No other drums were allowed on these racks. This helped to keep the material going to europe consolidated together.
In order to keep track of all of the drums on each pallet, I devised a graphical organizing system that was cheap, easy and effective. Seen on the right of the rack is the system. Each pallet position was given its own small whiteboard. When a new pallet was placed in, the one or two ones previously there could be removed and restuck into their new positions using velcro on the back of the boards. This eliminated the need to constantly erase and rewrite the information of the pallets already there. If one pallet was moved onto another rack, the whiteboard could simply be placed onto the new racks organizer.
This is the stand alone, selective rack with the double stack on the bottom.
