Global Provider of Healthcare Manufacturing Solutions

The customer reached out to Stein two years ago to begin the planning of their new facility. During this time, they engaged several companies in the bidding process.  Stein ultimately won the project due to our level of service. There were several revisions and design change requests requested over the course of planning and the customer stated that our level of service was always far ahead of our competitors.

Over the course of 2 years, we worked thru several storage scenarios with the customer while they were waiting on the final design of their new manufacturing facility. Once they were able to provide us with the final facility layout, we created various layouts of both selective rack and pallet flow rack.

The pallet flow rack proved to be the best utilization of the new warehouse space, providing adequate storage with guaranteed first-in/first-out capability in the least amount of floor space. Various styles of the customer’s pallets were sent to the roller manufacturer for testing, and a test report was returned to the customer detailing which pallets would and would not work in the system. The result was a mixture of 10-deep and 13-deep x 4-high pallet flow rack with full-width rollers.

During the course of the project, we were met with several challenges which…..

• Pallet Size Change
  The system had originally been designed for a max pallet width of 42”, but after the order had been placed, the customer expressed the need to also store 48” wide pallets. We worked with the rack manufacturer and the roller manufacturer to make minor adjustments to the overall system design to allow for both sizes of pallets to be utilized in the system, with no additional costs to the customer.

• Changes were made to the building after the rack order was placed
  At the time of installation, we discovered that the builder had made changes to the warehouse area that we were unaware of at the time the rack order was placed. An airlock between manufacturing and the warehouse area was actually 4’ longer than shown in the original order, which affected roughly 1/3 of our rack layout. We were able to work with the customer to adjust this portion of the rack as needed and still keep the full storage capacity of the rack system.
• Impeded access between manufacturing and warehouse areas
  At the time of installation, the customer was informed that critical manufacturing equipment would need to be moved periodically in/out of the production area, and that this equipment was quite large. The only way to move the equipment was thru the warehouse area, and into the production area. They had no prior knowledge of this requirement, and that a portion of the rack layout would impede this access. We worked with the customer to find a new location for 3 rows of 13-deep pallet flow that would allow the equipment to be moved and that the customer could still be able to utilize the racks as originally planned.

The initial estimated time of completion was 4-5 weeks, which proved to be accurate. While there were some intermittent delays due to the challenges presented above, we worked with the customer to ensure that the project was completed to meet their required time frame.

The customer now has a first-in first-out storage system to accommodate several different style pallets of varying sizes and weights, all within the same system.