Think Big in Georgia: What happens with Interroll pallet flow installations over time?
24 hours a day, 7 days a week, heavy duty applications. We met with the guys that trusted Interroll more than 10 years ago!
“Building this warehouse from the ground up gave us an opportunity to look at alternatives to traditional racking systems, and our research led us to dense flow storage” says Darren Farber, Vice President, Operations, GILMER Companies. “Because our plans called for an unusually large facility—approximately 550,000 square feet—the top racking vendors were all interested, and several presented solutions to us.“
In its final design, Gilmer’s new, custom, high-density Pallet Flow system was indeed substantial in size, but required much less space than Gilmer had anticipated. Interroll’s dense flow reduced Gilmer's overall space requirement from 550,000 to 320,000 square feet. That provided us with tremendous cost savings in capital investment, as well as a significant reduction in forklift material-handling equipment and operators required to run the facility and meet the volume expectations.
Farber says that the Interroll solution is operationally excellent:
From a productivity standpoint, our deepest storage lanes are 22 pallets deep, and the quality of the system allows our product to flow with an insignificant amount of tracking over the 100-foot distance. With this depth, you would predict tracking issues, yet we have none, and by allowing the system to transport the pallets towards the loading docks we achieved a 50 percent improvement in loading productivity. The system also manages FIFO, with all product charged in from the rear and then flowing via gravity to the front of the system as pallets are picked from each lane.
