When you hear the phrase “storage rack inspections”, what comes to mind?  Do you visualize walking through your warehouse, marking down signs of damage, and handing your findings over to your maintenance department to repair?  Are you imagining bent racking frames and chipped paint from impacts, rails knocked out of place, and anchor bolts pulled clean out of the floor?  If you’re like most seasoned supply chain professionals recalling years of insurance inspections and audits, this surely rings true.  Traditionally, rack inspections focus solely on physical damage and its immediate repair, distilling the safety of these massive, dynamic structural systems down to a simple checklist.  Too simple, in our opinion, which is why we feel that storage rack inspections should take much more into consideration.

Broadly speaking, a storage rack system has three governing criteria categories that together will produce a quantifiable assessment of overall safety, reliability, suitability, and integrity.  These categories encompass Design, Physical, and Operational criteria (more on these below).  We strongly recommend that rack inspection processes evolve across the industry to consider this wider vantage point, for four reasons:

• Only inspecting visible damage does not address the root cause, destined to repeat in the future.
• Many conditions that result in accidents are not related to physical impact.
• External factors often change that go completely unrecognized, at times never fully understood even after an accident occurs.
• Proactive and preventative technical improvements largely go overlooked in warehouse systems, and adding this to an established inspection program significantly bolsters warding off unintended consequences down the road.

Now that we’ve made our case on expanding storage rack inspections beyond mere structural evaluations, let’s discuss each criteria category and their example considerations.

 

Inspecting Design Criteria

First up we have Design Criteria, which involves inspecting a rack system against its engineering parameters, code elements, and systematic limitations.  Example questions that would be reviewed in a robust inspection include:

Is the system being used as it was originally intended? 

Managers should retain all original design documentation, specifications, equipment manuals, and warranty certificates, and use these as the source material to evaluate current and potential functionality against.  If the system is ever upgraded, so too should this documentation be revised to match.  Container weights, dimensions, positioning, distribution, even loading sequences may all have had original requirements that should be maintained, and these details tend to be the first to be lost to memory.

Have any major code or standard updates occurred that may require design updates?

Code compliance is an interesting topic.  To be clear, we’re not suggesting that changes in code normally require changes to installed systems – systems are typically only required to meet code in place at the time of installation.  But, while most folks view code changes as cost burdens to be avoided, sometimes code changes are very useful indicators of real risks or opportunities that businesses should be aware of.  For example, changes in the 2022 NFPA 13 Fire Sprinklers code augmented pallet racking sprinkler requirements in response to real warehouse fire risks.  Savvy managers with an ear to the ground on these changes benefitted from early notice of actual hazards seen in the industry, which they could then choose to voluntarily implement based on their individual risk tolerance.

 

Inspecting Physical Criteria

From the above examples, readers can already see that our expanded inspection approach is much more than a simple Yes/No checklist.  While this process may at first seem overly detailed, we argue that the resulting insight and proactive mitigation it leads to is well worth the effort.  Next we’ll continue to Physical Criteria, made up of the more conventional visual assessment items we’re all used to, but with a few added details.

Are there any signs of concern that require immediate attention?

For this question, we envision a person walking the racking system with a thorough, technical assessment form in hand that clearly lists out both the pertinent Design Criteria discussed above, as well as visual references for concerning conditions.  An evaluator is looking for much more than damage – badly positioned goods, looming hazards, exceeded weight limits, missing signage, and of course the usual dings and scratches.  Two key pieces to this:

1. The evaluator needs a visual reference, so that we are not relying on their subjective judgement to spot a hazard.
2. The objective is to find “concerns” and not “damage”, opening up the evaluation to any and all conditions that deviate from Design, best practice, company policy, and common-sense criteria.

Are all safety devices and systems in place, functional, and tested?

Still discussing physical elements, here we’re looking for tangible safety, notification, communication, and protection devices to be present and in good working order.  In our expanded view of rack inspections, the key piece here is frequent and in-situ testing, which is often overlooked in traditional inspections.  Barricades should be bump tested, warning annunciation sounded, traffic crossing beacons pulsed, telematic HUDs messaged, and so on.  Further, referring back to the Design Criteria, additional safety solutions may be called for, such as weight limit signage for different racking segments.

 

Inspecting Operational Criteria

With Design and Physical Criteria out of the way, now we’ll turn our attention towards inspecting elements that involve day-to-day operations.  A storage rack system is only as safe as the staff working around it, and the materials placed into it.  For this reason, we urge all rack inspections to consider warehouse operations through questions such as:

Are employees receiving appropriate training, both upon hire and ongoingly after that?

This question looks at managerial and human resource practices involving warehouse employees, seeking to confirm that both leadership and general staff are totally aligned on the risks involved in normal operations.  Leadership must have a visceral understanding of code, safety, and functional requirements involved in their racking systems.  Employees must likewise be informed of each of these risk factors in a systematic, standardized, easy-to-understand manner, and often.  A great way to assess this interaction is to gauge employee training practices.  If training is thorough, documented, and occurring regularly, you’re off to a great start.  If training is lacking, both leadership and employees need to immediately halt and address the gap.

Is routine maintenance occurring and proactively addressing the correct needs?

In many ways, training and maintenance exist on the same plateau.  Training drives awareness and ownership of risk factors, while maintenance acts upon that awareness by physically seeing that risk ownership through to risk mitigation.  Routine and preventative maintenance takes that one step further, driving ownership of risks so deep that specific employees take on the responsibility of mitigating potential risks before they grow into actual risks.  By checking in on routine maintenance activities via established storage rack inspection procedures, warehouse managers actively turn looming hazards into prevented hazards.  Finally here, by creating an environment where routine training and maintenance occur side by side, employees become increasingly comfortable thinking about the operating conditions, risks, and safety requirements of the warehouse overall.  This ends up being the ultimate goal of our broader rack inspection program, bringing so much more benefit to an organization than a traditional racking walk-around.

 

Rack Builders, Inc is the United States’ premiere industrial Storage Racking Engineering and Manufacturing company, driven by our core values of Ingenuity, Quality, Integrity, and People.  With Turn-Key capabilities from concept design through installation, our Quincy, IL based team directly serves domestic and international contractors, builders, integrators, distributors, and end-users alike.  Our 200,000 sq ft manufacturing facility and certified fabricators produce custom racking solutions that have earned us accolades including MHEDA Most Valuable Supplier award and MHI’s prestigious R-Mark.  We look forward to hearing about your next racking project!  Reach us at (847)-330-1724 or online at https://www.rackbuildersinc.com/.