The FMCG sector refers to those industries or businesses that manufacture or market Fast Moving Consumer Goods or products. These goods are commonly cheap, non-durable and have a short shelf life. That is, these goods are transported at a rapid pace from the manufacturing facilities to the storage facilities and finally to the showrooms and marketplaces from where they make their way to the customers.
Pallet Racking and its role in the industry:
The term pallet racking is now synonymous with the obligatory part of a business or an organization that can hail from a variety of sectors, including FMCG, but what it should mandatorily possess is a warehouse or storage or manufacturing or even a maintenance facility.
When any or all of these are present; material storage, as well as handling of products during storage, sorting, retrieval, inventory control, logistics, and shipment- all, become an enormous necessity. When the business or organization is about products or services, storage aid, as well as material handling, needs to be facilitated in some ways.
Warehouses are the ideal option for such business or organization as it is nothing but a customized storage building which: stores, stockpiles and even ships loads to requisite destinations.
But these days, since warehousing operations are also becoming an essential tool for every business, material handling, and storage aid facilities that boost warehousing operations are becoming the bare necessity to provide basic warehousing functions.
Pallet Racking is one of the utmost important storage and retrieval aid systems that are employed at large to support basic warehousing functions. In the FMCG industry also, different types of Pallet Racking may find a lot of applications.
The numerous applications of Pallet Racking in the FMCG industrial sector can be provided below.
- Storage and transportation convenience: Pallet racks being flat transport structures themselves; they boost the advantage of storage of products in the form of skids or pallets and therefore provide the ease of stored goods to be supported in a stable fashion and can be transported easily.
Both stable storage of goods and fast transportation of such is a matter of great importance in the FMCG sector as the products have an extremely small shelf life. They are transported rapidly from the manufacturing units to warehouses and ultimately to the reach of the consumers from markets and shops.
- Heavy Duty: Pallet racking or selective pallet racking is the simplest yet most heavy-duty storage and material handling system and therefore offers extreme protection to the stored goods.
FMCG products are generally non-durable and therefore this heavy-duty nature of Pallet Racking protects them from damage before they are shipped to their requisite destinations.
- Economic viability: Pallet racking provides the most economically feasible solution for palletized products that are stationed in storage facilities, modern-day warehouses and even when they are synthesized in manufacturing units.
- Multi storage options : Pallet racking provides access to storage of a variety of products in small quantities as well as unified goods in huge amounts that might be stacked together.
Both of these options have enormous usage in the FMCG sector.
- Re-adjustability: Pallet racking systems allow the ease of modification according to the structure and the requisitions of storage of the warehouse in concern.
Structural pallet racks are suited to the structure of the warehouse whereas Roll-formed pallet racks can be readjusted, disassembled, reconfigured and even restated as and when required.
- Ease of movement across warehouses: VNA or very narrow aisle pallet racking makes maximum utilization of spaces and does off with conventional rails or aisle spaces and makes movement easy within the facilities.
This ease of movement allows a fast flow of stored goods across the warehouse. This also allows for rapid picking options. Both of these are essential in the case of FMCG products.
- Inventory control: Palletised products offer greater visibility of stocks and inventory control becomes a very easy task for the organization.
Therefore the company can have easy access to the stocks they possess and those they have already shipped, and they need to refill. This is one of the ulterior utilisations that Pallet Racking systems enjoy in the FMCG industry.
Types of Pallet Racking systems that find usage in the FMCG sector :
- Drive-in/Drive through Pallet Racks
- Push Back Pallet Racks
- Pallet Flow Rack
- Selective Pallet Racks
All of the above-mentioned factors render Pallet Racking to be an indispensable storage and retrieval solution for the companies that belong to the FMCG industrial sector.