Industrial warehouse racking
Automated storage and retrieval
An automated storage and retrieval system puts the movement inside the racking: cranes or shuttles handle put-away and retrieval under software control, so no truck travels the aisle and the store can be both very tall and very narrow. Rejuva delivers these projects with the racking, the building work and the surrounding trades under one point of contact.
What automation changes about a racking system
In a conventional warehouse the storage is passive and the truck does the work, which sets the aisle width, caps the height at what the truck can lift and puts a driver next to the load at every movement. Automating the store moves the handling into the structure itself. Once no truck has to enter, aisles narrow to the width of the load and the racking goes as high as the building allows.
What follows from that is mostly arithmetic: more pallet positions in the same footprint, movements that run at a set rate rather than a variable one, and a stock record that comes from the system doing the moving rather than from someone recording it afterwards. What it costs is flexibility, because the layout and the throughput are designed in and are not casually changed later.
Automation is a decision about how a store is worked, not about what it is built from. It is often paired with clad-rack construction, since both suit very tall buildings, but either can be done without the other.
Types of automated storage
Which system fits is decided mainly by what is being handled, and then by how fast it has to move.
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Crane-served pallet stores
A stacker crane runs the full height of a narrow aisle and serves both sides of it. The usual answer for a tall, high-volume pallet store, and the system behind most high-bay warehouses.
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Shuttle systems for pallets
Shuttles run inside the storage lanes and move pallets along them, either as a fully automated block or, in the semi-automated form, with a truck placing the shuttle and lifting from the aisle.
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Box and tote systems
For stock handled as cartons and totes rather than pallets, where the goods are brought to the picker instead of the picker walking a face. Raises pick rate and accuracy at once.
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Automated shelving for small parts
Compact units that retrieve a tray or a bin to an access point, used where a wide range of small items is held in a small space, often beside production.
What automated racking gives you
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Positions in the same footprint
Aisles cut back to the load width and heights beyond truck reach are what turn the same floor into substantially more pallet positions.
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A predictable rate
Movements run at a designed throughput rather than one that varies with shift, driver and traffic, which is what makes the plan match the day.
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Fewer picking errors
The system moves what the software says it moves, so the accuracy of the stock record stops depending on the accuracy of the paperwork.
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Fewer people near moving loads
Taking trucks out of the storage aisles removes the exposure behind most serious warehouse incidents.
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Stock visible in real time
Every movement is recorded as it happens, which is what makes stockouts and overstock visible early enough to act on.
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Room to extend
Aisles, cranes and shuttles are added to a design that anticipated them, provided the growth was part of the brief at the start.
What Rejuva does on an automation project
An automated store is never only a storage purchase. It pulls in the floor, the building envelope, the fire strategy, the lighting, the power and the traffic routes around it, and those have to be sequenced against an installation that cannot easily pause.
Rejuva runs that as one project: the survey and layout, the racking, the surrounding trades and one point of contact for the whole job, rather than a supplier per discipline with the client left to referee the dates between them.
Racking services, from first survey to buy-back
Racking is not only bought. It has to be installed to the design, inspected while it is in use, repaired when it is hit, and moved or sold when the operation changes.
Racking systems we design and install
Every system sits somewhere on one trade-off: selectivity, meaning you can reach any pallet at any time, against density, meaning how many pallets fit into the same floor area.
Have a project in mind?
Describe what needs to happen in the building and we will come back with a proposed approach, the specialist who would carry it out and a budget you can work with.