DriveIn / Drive-Thru Racking
DistribuTek Leaning Center
An expansion of the double deep concept and still utilizing a last-in/first-out
storage and retrieval procedure is drive-in rack. This rack has bays
three or more
loads deep. To allow standard lift equipment access to the loads, instead of the
pallets straddling load beams front-to-rear, parallel to the aisle; they straddle
load beams left-to-right, perpendicular to the aisle. This
arrangement allows lift equipment to actually enter the racking system. The load
beams are referred to as support rails within the industry, and they do in fact
appear to be rails because they travel the entire depth of the bay, which may be
20 or more feet deep. They are supported from the vertical column from a cantilever-type
member called a support arm. Of course, since the lift truck must enter the structure,
no beams are allowed to span left to right in the truck's path. This means that
the only beams allowed parallel to the aisle may be those placed overhead to tie
the vertical members, either frames or single columns, together. Drive-in rack is
a very dense storage
configuration which can be an efficient utilizer of space,
as long as system utilization is high. This means that the product mix stored must
be such that it is possible to keep the rack highly loaded. Since all the front loads in an entire bay of drive-in must be unloaded in order to get to the next
deepest loads, and so on, drive-in is best used in operations which store a large
volume of like product. If this were not the case, and a user needed to store only
a few pallets of each SKU, or there was a need for fast product rotation, system
utilization would be low because loads could not be stored in some locations in
order to keep other loads accessible. A drive-thru rack is merely a drive-in rack
that is accessible from both sides of the rack. It is for staging loads in a flow-thru
fashion
where a unit load is loaded at one end and retrieved at the other end. Where
the drive-in rack requires only one aisle for proper operation, the drive-thru requires
two (entrance and exit).
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