Storage has become like every other facet of timber trading; a key area of the business from which to improve operating efficiency and to maximise capital investment. Primitive buildings and stacking arrangements that had evolved piecemeal over the years are a thing of the past.
“This is what is driving the business we are in,” said Chris Wilson, managing director of Racks Industries. “There is a need to maximise the use of space to maximise the use of land, and to gain efficiencies. This is becoming ever more necessary because of land values, more regulations and to make a business cost-effective.”
Hi-Store managing director Keith Hancock said that while the movement of timber merchants to new premises, especially out of town locations, and manual handling legislation, were important in creating new business, the key driver was timber’s increasing popularity.
“As a construction material there is nothing finer and its popularity means the timber industry and consequently ours is expanding at a far greater rate than inflation,” he said.
In addition to general business conditions, merchants are facing more and more demand from customers to increase stock holding and the choice of stock to view on display. Improvements in these areas also reduce the cost of labour in handling materials and damage to stock during storage and retrieval.
Safety
Physical safety is also important in that more stringent health and safety requirements are constantly being considered, and the fact that, according to the Health & Safety Executive, 20% of fatal injuries and 13% of major injuries in woodworking result from people being struck by objects, including timber falling from stacks.
In recent years many products and systems have been developed. Mr Wilson said racked buildings designed, manufactured and erected by the company were proving popular. Last year Racks Industries completed a fully-racked steel building for Snows Timber in Andover to stock an additional 1,500m3 of planed timber. Snows, which has annual sales in excess of £25m, processes more than 120,000m3 of softwood annually.
“Our other products are in many timber merchants, but a whole building is more and more the choice with our customers,” Mr Wilson said.
Hi-Store has a patented building product under its Canti-Clad brand. “You can put up a shed and fill it with racking or you can put in full cantilever racking and support a roof off the columns,” said Mr Hancock. “You cannot move the racking around, that’s true, but the roof restrains the columns to control any bending, which you always get when you add weight, so you can increase the capacity without increasing the column size. In effect, cost-wise, you get a building with the racking free.”
Hi-Store, using its Canti-Lock cantilever racking, has a successful system for I-beams in which prepacked bundles are stored at high level before being brought to working level and manoeuvred on a roller bed for cutting to length with a cross-cut saw, and stored for despatch on a second set of racking.
However, the consensus among storage suppliers is that vertical racking, pallet racking and A frames for moulding will continue to be important, along with cantilever racking and increasingly mezzanine floors.
Pigeon-hole racks
Filplastic UK has experienced increased sales of cantilever as well as vertical racking to timber merchants, however, a recent trend is toward pigeon-hole racks to store lengths of timber in individual compartments created within vertical dividers, which can be moved as stock rotates and storage requirements change.
The spokesperson said pigeon-hole racks were also popular as a base to create a rack-supported mezzanine floor storage area to replace lost floor area.
Pro-Deck Storage Systems said best use of space as well as the ability to handle fast-moving product lines quickly, was driving demand for the company’s cantilever racking. It installed a cantilever system at the Trafford Park branch of International Timber (IT) last year, where the 7.5-acre site has 170,000m2 of covered storage. Order picking was speeded up as the working environment was improved to more effectively cope with first-in first-out procedures and allow sideloader operators to work more productively. The arm positions can be also be altered to allow for different products.
IT managing director Tony Miles said: “While block-stacking is still used for some products to make best use of space, some of our customers order a large variety of products in relatively small quantities, all to be delivered to many different outlets. These orders can be fulfilled far more quickly since we installed the cantilever racking.”
