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How The Way You Use Your Fork Lift Truck Maybe Affecting Your Profits
Most consider the fork lift truck as a simple tool to help our weak bodies lift and move heavier items around with speed and efficiency without hurting anybody. However the way you actually use your fork lift truck could greatly affect your bottom financial line.
Free Stacking Pallets with your forktruck is perhaps the easiest and most economical methods of storage. You are basically putting each pallet on top of each other and creating a stable stack of products. This usually only works well when dealing with large amounts of the same product, or pallets with the same or similar dimensions and height. A major disadvantage in this approach however is that you usually only have access to the items last stored and so a First In First Out system is not available.
Pallet Racking is where a system of pallet racks are setup which enable safe storage of different sized pallets to be stored. The system enables you to access any pallet individually (enabling First In First Out or Last In First Out) and the rack can grow and change shape to suit your daily requirements. To enable full access the aisles between the racks need to be large enough to allow a forklift truck to move around freely, this requirement will reduce the number of pallets you can handle within your environment, although depending upon the space availability this may not be an important factor.
Narrow Aisle Racking is similar to Pallet Racking but a special narrow fork truck is used which enables you to have much smaller spaces between the aisles of pallets. The obvious benefit here is that more product can be stored in the same space than compared to conventional racking. If you already have a standard fork lift truck however then this system may not be suitable as the cost in changing the truck to one more suitable for narrow aisle may be prohibitive.
So are you using your fork lift truck to its full potential? What are the time costs in storage and retrieval of your pallets, could you be using your fork truck more efficiently? If so you could have a great impact on your bottom line by either speeding the process up or increasing the usable space of your units.