The pharmaceutical industry is one of great importance to society at large. It manufactures healthcare supplies and other products that are meant to foster our wellness. Pharmaceutical products can be defined as those products which have been intended for human use or veterinary products that have to be administered to food-producing animals, is presented in its finished dosage form and is subject to control by the pharmaceutical legislation in import and export. The products are generally made available only after a valid prescription is provided. These products contain biological products, vaccines, medicines and etc.
But these pharmaceutical products are extremely sensitive. They have a stringent date of manufacture and expiry, beyond which their administration might be useless, detrimental or even fatal. They are also sensitive to temperature and humidity and hence a slight disturbance in the climatic conditions might cause them to decay or fail to produce desired results. They are also termed as TTSPPs or temperature and time-sensitive pharmaceutical products. Hence the storage, retrieval, and shipping of pharmaceutical supplies require utmost care and precision to prevent damage.
Pallet Racking and its usage :
The term pallet racking is a familiar term in the storage and retrieval operations that tags along compulsorily with any business or organization that might be part of any industrial sector, including the pharmaceutical industry. But the organization should mandatorily possess a warehouse or storage or manufacturing or even a maintenance facility.
When any or all of the above are present in a particular organization; material storage, as well as handling of products during storage, sorting, retrieval, inventory control, logistics, and shipment- all, become an essential and indispensable requirement. When the business or organization is about products or services, storage aid, as well as material handling, needs to be facilitated in some ways.
Especially in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, material storage, inventory control, retrieval, logistics, and shipment are of utmost concern because the products in question are extremely sensitive.
These days, since warehousing operations are also becoming an essential tool for every business, material handling, and storage aid facilities that augment basic and sophisticated warehousing operations for the better, are becoming the bare necessity.
Pallet Racking is one of the most important storage and retrieval aid systems that are employed at large to support basic warehousing functions. In the pharmaceutical industry also, different types of Pallet Racking may find a lot of applications.
The innumerable applications that Pallet Racking finds in the pharmaceutical industry can be provided below.
- Storage and transportation convenience: Pharmaceutical warehouses and other storage facilities need to be of an appropriate size and should house a controlled environment to store sufficient TTSPPs and other controlled products properly, and to meet demand.
Pallet Racks being flat, wooden or plastic structures and having the ease to be lifted by pallet jack or forklift trucks; boost the advantage of stable storage in the form of skids and pallets in the warehouse. They also provide ease in the transportation of tertiary packages which contain the pharmaceutical and other controlled products.
- Heavy Duty: Pallet Racking provides extreme protection to the goods and stored products because it is one of the sturdiest forms of storage solutions one can get.
Pharmaceutical and other controlled products are extremely delicate and sophisticated in nature. Therefore Pallet Racking is one of the handiest storage and retrieval aids that is employed in the pharmaceutical industry.
- Inventory control: One of the most important features of Pallet Racking is that it offers extreme visibility of stock. The stock keeping units or SKUs represent the smallest unit of the products that can be sold from inventory, purchased, or added to the inventory. These SKUs are extremely important and have their applications spread over wholesale and retail because they allow the monitoring of transactions, tracking of customer spending patterns, controlling inventory and purchasing and providing information about pricing. The SKUs can be a pallet itself or a tertiary carton, or even a secondary and primary container stored in the palletized form.
Therefore pharmaceutical supplies management becomes an easy task. Pharmaceutical supplies are extremely sensitive to date and their demands vary with seasonal fluctuations, natural calamities and even with the spread of localized disease. Using pallet racking, the pharma industry benefits at large.
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- Economic viability: Pallet racking delivers the most economically viable solution for palletized products that are stationed in storage facilities, modern-day warehouses and even when they are synthesized in manufacturing units.
- Controlled storage options: Palletised pharma products can be stored easily in temperature-controlled and temperature modified warehouses.
- Adjustability: Pallet Racking solutions allow the ease of adjustment, assembly, reconfiguration, and modification according to the structure and requisitions of storage of the warehouse where the pharma products are kept.
- Ease of movement across warehouses: VNA or very narrow aisle pallet racking makes maximum utilization of spaces and makes the movement of stored pharma products easy within the facilities.
The fast flow across warehouses encourages the logistics and shipment of pharma products to take a turn for the better.
In this way, Pallet Racking solutions make their importance felt in the case of the management of pharmaceutical supplies.