Sooner or later, any organization dealing with physical goods will hit that moment when the stock outruns the fit and the aisles become the bottlenecks. In the worst instances, people navigate around mountains of teetering stacks, forklift. As parked waiting on space at the dock, and buyer buy orders crawl to a stop. What you witness are archetypal signs of storage overload and they suck profit in ways rarely seen on a balance sheet. Longer transport distances, lower pick accuracy, and overtime to meet shipping deadlines.
The solution is much more than moving pallets around; this is about rethinking the entire storage ecosystem, deploying purpose-built warehouse equipment Perth, and smart, reusable Plastic crates that unlock cubic footage without extending the warehousing footprint.
Exploring High Throughput Venues, Storage Havens and Everything in Between
When throughput, how fast products can flow in, be stored, and flow out — is less than demand, bottlenecks arise. In some cases, it can be one slow process that is lacking and it is hard to compete with an automated receiving line when you have manual de-palletizing. Sometimes, the limitation is simply spatial — that is, too many mixed-size cartons stacked in awkward configurations that use up valuable vertical clearance and block travel lanes. There is nothing worse than a bottleneck—unless it is a bottleneck that is also the true bottleneck, which means it cascades—first one lane stops, and then all lanes backup behind it. Goods move to staging areas, emergency overflow fills trailers, and the original lag permeates through order fulfilment, forming a never-ending cycle of slow motion.
Heavy-Duty Warehouse Equipment That Acts as Blank Canvas for Transformation
A way out of this congestion has been proven: it begins with high-density, fast-cycle warehouse technology. This could mean that steel reinforcement is added to high-bay pallet racking to allow for the storage of deeper lanes on taller loads, thereby allowing for the same amount of storage space to be held and stacked higher within the same footprint. Narrow-aisle lift trucks — some equipped with cameras and laser sensors to guide them around the warehouse — dart through aisles narrower than 2 meters, freeing up valuable square meter age for rack rows. In other cases, vertical lift modules, along with mezzanine platforms, reclaim vertical air space—turning a single-level facility into an overhead productivity center. But these innovations hit their sweet spots when the containers flowing through them are equally reliable, resilient, and ready for automation.
Plastic Crates — the Best Buddies
Enter Plastic crates, the dimensional variability and container fatigue-killing injection-molded perfect precision. Over time, corrugated boxes flatten, putting rack stability at risk and jamming conveyors. Wood splinters, absorbs moisture and adds weight and contamination risk. Conversely, contemporary polymer compounds retain their precise geometry over thousands of cycles, and they allow automatic shuttle systems and gravity flow lanes to operate at factory-rated speeds interspersed with free-flowing periods, where no stopping is required. Plastic crates, when designed to standard footprints—600×400 mm in Europe, 24×16 in North America—slot neatly into tote shuttles, automated storage and retrieval systems and even some robotic palletizers, integrating container and machine.
Developing a Slotting Strategy based on the Crate
To rid itself of bottlenecks, a warehouse needs to consider more than just procuring new bins; it needs to rethink slotting logic by far more than just crate specs. The first step should be SKUs segmentation by velocity and cube. Pick modules jammed with lightweight hand-carry crates grant fast movers easy access, while deep reserve racking piled with heavy-duty lidded plastic crates can house slow movers. Since all crates are of the same size, slotting algorithms can cram them in tighter because the footprint for every position will fit precisely. Even mixed-case items gain from this practice due to reusable dividers inside Plastic crates allowing to form small internal compartments while leaving the outside unchanged, sealing flawless coupling with conveyance and lift equipment.
