Storage and handling equipment
There are many types of special equipment that have been designed to reduce labor costs and/or increase space utilization.
Equipment can reduce labor costs by
• Allowing many skus to be on the pick face, which increases pick density and so reduces walking per pick, which means more picks per person-hour
• Facilitating efficient picking and/or restocking by making the product easier to handle (for example, by presenting it at a convenient height and orientation).
• Moving product from receiving to storage; or from storage to shipping. Equipment can increase space utilization by:
• Partitioning space into subregions (bays, shelves) that can be loaded with similarly-sized skus. This enables denser packing and helps make material-handling processes uniform.
• Making it possible to store product high, where space is relatively inexpensive.
5.1 Storage equipment
By “storage mode” we mean a region of storage or a piece of equipment for which the costs to pick from any location are all approximately equal and the costs to restock any location are all approximately equal.
Common storage modes include pallet rack for bulk storage, carton flow rack for high-volume picking, and (static) shelving for slower, lower-volume picking.