Industrial warehouse racking
Pallet shuttle racking
Pallet shuttle racking puts a battery-powered shuttle inside the storage lane and lets it move the pallets, so lanes can run far deeper than a truck could safely enter and the forklift never leaves the aisle. Rejuva designs, supplies and installs it across Europe.
What a pallet shuttle system is, and how it works
A pallet shuttle system is compact racking worked by a remote-controlled, battery-powered shuttle rather than by the truck. The forklift places the shuttle into the chosen channel and sets a pallet at the mouth of the lane; the shuttle takes it from there and runs it to the deepest free position. To retrieve, the shuttle brings a pallet back to the front and the truck lifts it away.
Because the truck never travels inside the structure, the lane can be far deeper than a drive-in lane, and the manoeuvre that causes most impact damage in dense systems disappears. The same shuttle is moved from channel to channel, so one device serves a whole block.
The system runs first in, first out or last in, first out depending on how the block is configured and worked, which is what lets it serve dated stock as readily as stock that leaves as a batch. It is semi-automated rather than automated: there is still a truck and still an operator, and the step up to full automation is the automated storage and retrieval system.
What pallet shuttle racking gives you
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Density beyond what a truck can reach
Lane depth stops being limited by how far a forklift can safely enter with a raised load, so far more of the floor becomes pallet positions.
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Faster put-away and retrieval
The shuttle works the lane while the truck stays at the face, which removes the slow, careful travel that deep-lane systems otherwise depend on.
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Less damage, to goods and to steel
Taking the truck out of the lane removes most of the contact risk in a dense block, which shows up in both the stock loss and the repair bill.
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Either rotation
Configured for FIFO where dates and batches govern, or LIFO where stock leaves as a block, without changing the structure.
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A design that follows the pallet
Channel width, level pitch and shuttle specification are set from the pallets and weights you actually run, across food, drink, pharmaceuticals and cold storage.
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A clearer picture of the stock
Shuttle movements are controlled and logged rather than left to the driver, which makes what is in each channel easier to hold accurately.
Where a shuttle system is the right answer
The pattern that suits it is a small number of lines, a large number of pallets of each, and a throughput that a drive-in block would slow down. Food and drink, cold storage and pharmaceuticals reach it first, because they combine deep, repetitive stock with a rotation that has to be controlled.
It is also the honest answer when drive-in has simply run out of depth: rather than adding more blocks and more aisles, the same footprint is worked harder by putting the movement inside the lane.
The system costs more to install than static racking, and what it returns depends on your throughput, your labour cost and how much floor the density releases. Those are your numbers rather than ours, and a survey is where they get put against each other.
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.