How Stack Racks Improve Warehouse Efficiency

Organization is an essential component of efficient warehouse operations. Prioritizing warehouse organization, storage, and safety will not only optimize your operations, but positively impact your bottom line. Portable Stack Racks can help achieve these goals by providing a cost-effective storage solution that can streamline processes, increase inventory organization, optimize storage space, and are ideal for tight warehouse storage areas, especially if your warehouse needs to change the configuration quickly or often.

We spoke with John Nelson, owner of NSMC Steel Racks to help us better understand how stacking racks can improve a manufacturing or warehouse organization of this episode of the manufacturing experts.

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Transcript

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Organization is an essential component of any efficient warehouse operation. Storage product visibility, space utilization, and safety will not only optimize your operations, but positively impact your bottom line. Steel stacking racks can help achieve these goals by providing a cost effective storage solution that can streamline processes, increase inventory organization in optimized storage space, and are ideal for warehouse storage areas, especially if you need to change the configuration or layout quickly or often. We spoke with John Nelson, sales manager at ESCP Corporation, to help us better understand how stacking racks can improve a manufacturing or warehouse organization. On this episode of the Manufacturing Experts. Today we're talking with John Nelson from ESCP Corporation. We're going to learn more about material handling equipment and how stack racks can improve the material handling process and storing its storage efficiency for manufacturer. John, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Neil. How are you? And thanks for having me on. Oh, no problem. Always a pleasure to have you on. So John, tell us very briefly we're going to talk about material handling and we're going to be talking a little bit about how that improves material handling process and storage capacity for manufacturers. I think it's important that people understand what your expertise is in this. So if you could just give us just a brief thing of how come you know so much about this. Well, for the last 17 years, I have been here helping our OEM customers and regular customers with material handling equipment that's from anything from a shipping rack to a stacking rack to a basket, wire mesh, heavy duty basket or tub or container and other anything that had to do with material handling. And we do it for several different industries, the custom metal fab industry like construction equipment, agricultural vehicles, military vehicles, and other vehicles in the automotive industry. And we also make racks for OEMs who make glass like float glass. So Cardinal Guardian larger OEMs of glass product would buy racks from us as well. So over the years, we take our customers designs and we quote the rack and suggest any if we have suggestions when we're quoting them, we do. And of course, they have to give us a dimension build to print with a BOM so that we can quote it properly. And if they don't have one, then we can use our outside engineering firm to have one made up for them if they give us their concept. And of course, we have to quote them and they have to pay for it. So we have to get a PO and all that kind of stuff. But generally speaking, making a design from start to finish costs for a dimension build to print with a bill of material. A BOM cost anywhere from concept to the end to having all the file, all the PDF files, all the step files and DXF files, to quote it and make it with it's. Right around $1,500 is what our engineers charge. In a previous podcast, we had talked about stack racks. I wanted to focus today on, number one, how stack racks are specific in answer to the question I'm about to put forward to you. But also the big thing we look at is how much does an effective racking system or an effective rack impact the material handling effectiveness of a manufacturer? Well, let me back up just a little bit. A lot of people are trying to lower their carbon footprint, so they don't want to cut trees down, so they don't want to use wood or cardboard or any of this other stuff. What they want to do is make a rack out of steel so it's reusable and it does lower their carbon footprint. And in the long run, it's less costly because you might have a big upfront expense to buy 50 or 100 or 250 or 300 rags, but it depends upon the size of your program. So it's all relative to what you're doing. But once you have the rack, I mean, you know, we, we make these tubes. Like, for instance, we might make a rack to hold £9000. So we're using, depending upon the with the BOM, the bill of material, the material we're using with the wall thickness of the tubing and all that, these racks, there could be a nuclear war and these things are going to still be standing because they last a long time is what I'm saying. Even though fork truck drivers are known to be a little reckless and they might hit them, but they're sturdy enough to stand up to all that kind of stuff. Okay, so I guess that's going to lead into the next question I have, which is what are the main issues to a warehouse or to a manufacturer with material handling inventory areas? Well, it changes all the time. If you're like a warehouse and you have different product at different time of the year, you want to be able to move your warehouse around to be able to use up all the space, not just the floor space, but the space from the floor to the ceiling. So using rack, it allows you to be able to stack them, and then when you're done with them, and then you stack them and then take them from your warehouse and send them to wherever they got to go. And then when they're empty, you can break them down and they would stack. Then you could stack them on top of each other as well. When they're empty, they take up a lot less space and it still gives you plenty of room to navigate around your warehouse with. Okay, but basically, in the long run. You save time, money, and space. Okay, now compare stack racks to just a racking system. What kind of differentiates it? They're two different animals. A pallet racking system is stationary. You assemble it and it stays there forever. With racks, you can move product on those racks. So they go from your floor, from wherever you're assembling or making parts. Parts get put on there. And whenever they go to get to their final part, they stay on those racks. Even when they go to the paint line, they come off the rack, go through the paint, get back on the rack, and then they go to shipping and stage ready to get on a truck and go to the customer. The customer will use that product, then send the rack back to the manufacturer of the component part to get refilled. And so it's called continuous flow. Racks are used for it's a word that in the industry that they use called kan bonding. You're controlling your inventory flow. Okay, tell us a little bit about now, this is one of the things that I know in our previous conversation, we talked about with stack racks. So tell us a little bit about the stack racks that you manufacture and how that kind of accomplishes these goals. We use our customers designs, and the racks that we make are from their prints. Now, if they want us to help them do that, we do have an outside engineering firm that can help them do that. But we're making racks specifically for their product. So once they put it on there, once they get the racks, then, for instance, like, I won't name names, but let's say a battery company wants to order a bunch of racks because they make batteries, they want to store them and ship them. They give us a print, we quote it, make it. Or they give us a PO. We make it, we ship it to them. And then they use that in their warehouse to make the product that they're making flow faster, flow easier, to use less space to be more efficient so they can have more space to do other things with. And they don't have to use it for once we're stacking that rack from the floor all the way to the ceiling, there is floor space left for other things that they can do it with, for them to do something else with. And I know one of the things that my big thing would always be is something like about talk about the strength of it. Because I think that's one of the things that's important is that when you stack something and you've got material in it, there's a lot of weight involved into it. Is that something they should be aware of, of the construction or the quality or what it's capable of holding? That's a great question, Neil. The truth is that the rack should be made with the load capacity in mind. So if a guy knows he's going to have£5000 on that rack, he has to tell us. I want to make it 45 when I get the print. It might be 40 inches wide, 40 inches long, 48 inches tall, and to hold a capacity of £6000. So then we know with the bill of material from the print that an engineer has designed, saying that this is where type of material that you use, the class of material that you use, this is how you weld it. This is where you put the welds if you stitch weld or complete weld. And because we're going to make it to their specification for it to hold those £6000 to stack five or six high, all that's done in the engineering of the rack. I think you just answered my question, because that's the biggest thing I say, is that a lot of people are going to say, well, I'll just save some money and just go buy something off of the local supplier type thing that's already pre made. And it sounds like you get a lot of people that they've either learned their lesson or for some reason they want something custom tailored to what their application is. Well, let me just tell you this story. We make racks for the glass industry. And there was an incident several years ago where they were in a warehouse. They put glass on a rack, picked up, the rack was moving down the aisle, the welds broke on the rack and the glass fell. There was 7000 £8000 of glass on it, fell, and it killed two guys. So when the big glass company reviewed all their racks, they noticed that some vendors, like myself weren't following the instructions on the print. And to save money, they were stitch welding instead of complete welding. And so after years of use, the swells stitched weld, which is you do an inch long, instead of having a continual weld bead weld cord, you just have like an inch. You stitch it like you're stitching like sewing. And they found out that there was companies that was selling them racks that were stitch welding and not complete welding. And then they found out that we do complete welds. So even though we were more expensive, we are the preferred rack provider for them now because we don't cut corners. And I think that's important to hear because I think a lot of people, especially buyers, what can I get for the cheap? Not to negatively say anything negative about buyers, but sometimes when people just hear something, they need to understand the importance of some of these factors and what is actually what the end use is going to be, or what the end benefit is going to be to a company. You do have to have an engineer design the rack, but some people, like this battery company I was talking about, it's pretty cut and dry. They wanted it to be just for the sake of math, 40 x 40 x 48. And they wanted it to hold £4000. Well, we have constructed a design, your own rack brochure, that takes into account all of the conditions and so when you look at it, I don't know, I can send you the brochure, you can put it up or I can send it to people if they want to call and ask me. But it allows them, if they don't have an engineer on staff to design a rack, they can take our brochure and design a rack for that width, length, height, and to hold that capacity and to be stacked five I off of our brochure. Because we know what it we designed it to hold up either a 2000 pound capacity rack or a 4000 pound capacity rack. So if your rack falls in between there and you use our brochure to design it, you can rest assured that it'll do what it's supposed to do. I think that's excellent. I didn't realize you had something like that. Because that's important. Because you're not only just providing the material, the actual rack, you're helping people with a kind of a template or a worksheet that they can kind of determine a lot of those things and then start the conversation so that those can all be addressed in the customization or the development of it prior to the rack being manufactured. Let me take that a step further. People just call up and think, well, I need some rats, right? Like it's no big deal. And the truth is that there's a lot of safety involved and it is a big deal. So we're ISO certified 9001 2015. So our quality and our on time delivery is measured by an outside entity called Perry Johnson's registrar. And we have certain numbers that we have to hit and they audit all that and they would take our ISO certification away if we did not comply to their standards. But making a rack isn't just taking some tubes of steel and welding it together and putting a wood deck on it and sending it off. You have to know how much you want it to we have to know what size wall thickness, tube to use, what size tube to use, what weld wire to eat on, what capacity you want it to be, all of those factors into consideration. And we've made a brochure so that you can design a rack to hold £2000 capacity or 4000 pound capacity. And there's some dimension restrictions. You just have to go off the brochure if you want it to be 60 inches by 40 inches or 60 inches by 50 inches. If you want the corner post to be a certain height, then what we ask for is outside dimensions and then we know how to convert to get to the dimensions that they want. Well, that sounds important right there because I'm thinking that everybody's going to have a different warehouse area or something like that. And there's going to be restrictions also just on the size of your area and trying to move things around if you have to move around. Right? Let me make one correction. We want the inside dimension and we know what to add on to it. To do the outside dimension, I need to know what are they going to put on there, what is the inside dimensions of what they're going to put on that rack. And then if they go off the brochure and they want it to be inside dimensions, 40 by 40, and they want it to be 40 inches high and 2000 pound capacity, then there's a section on it. If they go to it, we'll tell them exactly what numbers to write down and send to us to make the quote with those instructions. That'd be just like sending me a dimension build to print and a BOM which would have all that arm if it was designed by an engineer. And if they send it to me, I give that to my Estimator. My estimator has been doing this 34 years. So he goes through it and does all these calculations, calls the steel company, gets the lead times and all that stuff goes on to our quote and we give it to the customer and they can decide if they want to buy from us or not. I like the fact that you do all that groundwork. I don't think people realize there's a lot of planning. You just don't go out, grab some tubes and start welding. There's a lot more to it. And people shouldn't just go do that because we just mentioned safety, the size, things like that, that play into something along those lines. So that makes a big difference. Yeah, and we powder coat our racks, put them through an oven that's at 400 degrees or plus that way, because fork truck drivers are hard on these things and they hit them, run them into buildings and other racks. So when you powder coat them, you really have to abuse them to get the paint to come off. Once you powder coat them, and that way they don't rust either. So you want to prevent them from rusting as well, so they last a lot longer. You actually have a full powder coating department, right? Yeah, we have a complete paint department. That's right. We can do wet paint or powder coat paint. But you'd probably recommend the powder coat because it just sounds like it has racks. I do, yes. For racks I do. Okay. It all depends on what they're doing with them. But yes, I recommend powder coat. I think one of the things, and again, from previous conversations and people don't realize that maybe the first podcast they listen to is that you can take it from like beginning to end and we're not sending it out somewhere. It's not something done. You can do everything from the initial call all the way through to delivery. Yeah, I actually do a lot. I mean, people call me up and they want a rack and they got an idea and it always comes down to I said, well, do you got a print you could send me? They go well. No, I don't. Do you have an engineer on staff that could draw one up to the specs that you want? They go, no, I don't. Well, I do. And let's say they want 100 racks or 50 racks. So the $1,500, if you're going to buy 100 racks, you quote the rack and add $10 to it or $15 to it, and that's the $1,500 you have to amortize it in. It's part of the cost of the racks. But it's an upfront cost because we have to pay the outside engineering firm to design the because they're the experts. They're the ones that know exactly what size tube to use and to do the right specs for everything to make it so that when they stack them five high with £4000 on them, you want to be thankful for the knowledge of knowing that they're not going to crumble. Yes, that would be an important thing, especially for safety. Right. I think one of the other things is not just the safety for the employees and the people around that this also protects the part. If I'm not mistaken, this is also part of lean is to touch it as few times as possible, but this also protects the part, and I would imagine also just makes it more organized. Lots of racks has doneage arms and locking mechanisms and Dunnage HDPE or, UHMW, so that when you put the part in there and you nest it, it can't be scratched, the paint can't be scratched off. Oh, no, that's interesting. That's all in the design. All that kind of stuff comes in the design. So if you want to have locking arms and you want to be able to nest parts a certain way and you don't want them to paint the chip, all of that is done in the design phase, all put into the design of the rack. And it can be designed right for the type of product that you're doing too. That's exactly right, yeah. So we not only work with the steel suppliers, but we work with plastic and people who provide Dunnage and other things for the manufacturing industry. Let's say, for instance, there's a density that the customer wants in the container so that they can get a certain amount of parts on a 53 foot van. In a 53 foot van. So you want them side by side. You want them to be able to stack too high, and you go from the back of the truck to the front of the truck. So you have this amount of density when you're shipping them to maximize your efficiencies and cost. And minimize your cost. All that's considered in the designing of the rack. If you just need a rack for one or two products, you know, you only need one or two racks, that's one thing. But if you're we supply racks to people who are making vehicles of all types and assembling things of all types. You might be making 2000 racks for them or 1500 racks for them. And these racks have got to be in the material flow. They have to have so many empty in the shop and so many with parts on them moving down the highway, going to wherever they need to go. So that's all considered in the planning phases of that rack that you're going to have made. If somebody wants they need a rack, they can call me, you know what I mean? We can help them design. We can get a design or help them to get a design. If they want one rack, we'll make one rack for them. I mean, for PPG, they have this glass that they make in Texas and they need to ship it to PPG, Silmar it's aerospace. And it takes a huge aframe and it has to be shipped on a great big low boy. And they take this big piece of glass, one on one side and one on the other, strap it down to that low boy and move it from Houston to Stillmar, California. If there are special projects that people need racks for, we can help with that as well. You had something that was interesting and before we got on here, I was looking on the website and I noticed that there was one that, and correct me if I'm wrong, let's say you do have a lot of wooden pallets, and I know we're talking about the steel and all that. Let's say that I do use wooden pallets. You actually have something that can convert a wooden pallet into a rack. I'm really glad you mentioned that. We have what's called a pallet stacking frame. So it has a nexus in the middle. So you put the feet on, one goes north and south, the other one goes east and west so that you can bolt. When you bolt it together at the nexus and clamp it to the pallet, you could take another pallet and fill it up and stack it on top of that one. So you can make regular wooden pallets into stacking pallets with what's called a pallet stacking frame. And we make those frames. That's really cool because again, it's not for every case, but let's say there's somebody that more fits their need on something like that. And if they went to my website@escp.net and search for pallet stacking frame, they'd see exactly what I'm talking about. Explain what a Kaizen event is and how this plays into that. Well, let me just be practical, okay? At one time I worked at Yarozo Automotive and it's a plant down in Tennessee that makes component parts for at the time they're making the front and rear suspension for the Horizon truck. Okay. For Nissan, I think that is. Okay, yeah, there's somebody like that. Anyway, they want to make the most product with the fewest movements and people as possible. So when you start out, you might have ten guys on the line and they make 30 suspension an hour loading up different racks and moving it to places, and how they load their robots, their welding robots, and the fixtures and all that kind of stuff. So then you try to go down to nine and make the same. Well, when you start pulling people off the line to make the same amount of product, you might have to move some things around, how the material comes in, where the machines are set. So a kaizen event would be where everybody gets together and figures out what's the best set up, what's the best way to set up the line, to make this more efficient, to make these products more efficiently. It's a way to plan and come to a better setup of your facility so that you can make more product more efficiently. Okay. And when you mentioned about moving things and all that, that's again, that's where I keep thinking about with the stack rack, it can be easily disassembled, moved and put back in place and stack high. And that's not the case with all racks. A lot of racks are, like you said, they're permanently, some are permanently built. And for you to go in and move it would be a major cost and a major amount of time to do something like that. Well, I'm glad you said that, because kaijan comes in small steps or the goal over a long period of time. So instead of taking big steps that are pretty difficult, they try to do it in smaller steps, mostly practiced in the workplace. And it's used to increase profits by consistently improving productivity, a product or something similar to that. So the racks that we you can incorporate racks into all of that. And it's probably one of the best ways to accomplish what it is that you want to accomplish. One thing I've learned, and the whole purpose of doing the manufacturing expert is because it's not that people are out there aren't smart, but there's not a lot of tribal knowledge that doesn't get passed through to people. A lot of people that are new or kind of new to the industry and all that, they have the book smarts, but there's a lot of things that they need to understand from the outside. And I think that's one of the things here is you're giving your expertise to kind of help people with some of the things that maybe aren't directly put. Like a lot of websites aren't going to tell people, look at it this way, look at it this way. But it's important to kind of bring that out so that people understand, so that you don't get people making the decision of like, let's just go buy a rack and that'll solve our problem. We'll buy 1000 racks that you need to think this through. We need to these are important things to think about and have something customized so that it does the right job and then all the benefits that come with it. What you're saying is so true, and let me just expound upon that, okay? When someone is setting up a line, generally speaking, racks are the last thing that they think of. And unless they have a packaging engineer, because these racks are called packaging in the industry, okay, if they don't have a packaging engineer on staff to design the racks for them, usually they tell the lowest guy in the totem bo, hey, go find us some racks. And I get the majority of my business from those kind of guys who find me on my website or I get recommended by somebody else. They call me, they go, hey, I got to come up with a rack for this. And then because I've been doing this 17 years, I can help them. And then they become I mean, I really help them shine because then they solve the problem for their superiors, and they go, hey, you know what happens when you make somebody look good or you solve a problem that nobody else could get solved? And I've been doing it for a long time, so it takes me a lot shorter time to figure out what needs to be done than it would. The young guy that's just starting out, who has been tasked with going out and finding some racks. Lots of times when they say rags, he doesn't even know. He's thinking about something totally different, like a tire rack where it's outside and it's got tires sitting on it so people can select them. Or they're thinking of shelving. They're not thinking of a reusable shipping rack or a container because it's really a package that holds your product. And I think it's important because, like I said, that's the whole purpose of this podcast is to kind of highlight that, so that when people are looking at something like that, they see the topic and they learn more. About it. And they get more of the in depth thing that generally isn't when you go to websites. When you Google things, you get some bits and pieces. I like this because this kind of walks us through the entire process. Sure. And then we can walk them through. How many do you want to put on the rack? How many do you want to ship at a time? How many are you making a day? And then we can help we've done this for so long, and I'm not saying that we're the best at it, or I can solve any problem, but there's probably a template of a rack I've already made lots of times. I help people because I've already done something very similar. And we can use that as the template to go forward. Instead of starting from scratch, we can start with something else that we designed and say, hey. Let's start here. That will be our base. And then we'll put all of the what's called a trim package together. That's what's inside the rack that locks things down. Let me give you the last two minutes, and if you want to summarize before you leave, we're going to link your website in the show notes so that people can go there and we have a link where they can download the worksheet to be able to sure. They go to our website. My cell phone will be on there. They can call me. Here's the thing. This is what I want to say. Whether you're new at this or you've been doing it forever, if you call me, give me an opportunity to see what it is that I can do to be of service to you. Generally speaking, I help a lot of people who don't have any idea what they're doing, and I help a lot of people that do. So I'll be able to draw off of my 17 years of building racks for people. There'll be something I've already done that I can use as a template. My website is www.escp.net, and my cell phone is 563-271-3472. Whether you've got 30 years experience of this or you just started, give me a call. We can tell me what it is that you're looking for, what you want to do, and even if I can't help you, I will get you to somebody who can. That's nice. That's integrity is when you can actually say, you know what, here's somebody that could probably actually do what you want to do. I like that. I like the ability that if you can't do it, you can help them find who would do it. I'd rather make a friend and get him what he needs so I can help him down the road later so he'll remember me than just not help somebody with. But if there's something that I can't do, I will know someone who can do it because we collaborate together all the time. That's good to hear. There's about a dozen of us that we stay in the loop and we help each other with doneage and ideas and who's got the cheapest steel right now and all that kind of stuff. Well, and I think the last thing I want to point out, and then you can finish up with anything else you want to add to it is, and I stress this on all the podcasts, is you are a US. Manufacturer and your products are made in the United States and you're providing work and products and revenues that go into the United States, correct? That is absolutely correct. We are in Davenport, Iowa, in the middle of the country. So we could ship anywhere. It's not a big problem. We're actually in a hub zone, and we have about 50% of our employees are Hispanic or minority. So we provide jobs for a lot of people. That's great. And I think that's something else, that if somebody is looking for a job, I'm just going to plug that for you because I know that a lot of people are constantly looking for employees right now. Yeah, Michelle Klein is our H and R person, but if they call up to ESCP 5632 400 and ask for Michelle, she'll tell them that's 563324, she will tell them what jobs are available. Excellent. Excellent. Anything else we want to cover before we wrap up? We've pretty much covered it. The purpose of this is to let people know that I know what I'm talking about. I know what I'm doing. I've been doing it for a while and I can help them in any situation. Even if I can't help them, I'll know someone who can. I just invite people to call me. I mean, if you're working on a rack project, if you have it in hand, no worries. But if you got questions or you don't know what you're going to do, give me a call, let me help you. We appreciate that. And again, thank you. The second podcast we've done together and I greatly appreciate it. I feel the same way. I really appreciate you doing this for us, Neil. And like I said, our strength is to help the listeners, to provide them with information and highlight a lot of the things they need to know on something like that. And you're always a help on that. And again, I thank you. Again. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Take it easy. Thank you for listening to our podcast. Our goal is to help reach small manufacturers with information and resources to help them improve their business. We therefore choose not to make money by running commercials on our podcast, but ask you to help us get the word out. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a few moments to subscribe to our channel or share it with a friend. We'd also like to hear from you and invite you to contact us via your email in the show Notes.