How Did Warehouse Racking Shape Forklifts And Vice Versa?

The size, shape, scale and efficiency of modern stockrooms and warehouses have been shaped by the evolution of three main elements: shelving, pallet storage and forklift trucks.

All three of these elements, as well as the containerisation of the supply chain, meant that by the 1960s logistics, warehouse storage and stockroom shelving had entered the modern age, and refinements of each of the three elements would have a ripple effect on the others.

Why is this the case? How did the warehouse shelf shape the forklift, how did the forklift shape the pallet, and how did the pallet further shape the warehouse shelf?

From The Soil To The Heavens

Once the building materials and components were available to do so, warehouses started to get as big and as tall as they could practically be whilst still being usable spaces.

The core principle of this comes from the property principle of ad coelum or the idea that whoever owns a piece of land owns it from the depths of the earth all the way to the edge of space, at least in theory.

In modern property law, this is no longer the case for various practical reasons, but the principle remains that the most efficient warehouse design is as high as possible before the cost of building a tall building reaches the point that it costs more to build up than it would be to buy land.

Initially, warehouses were limited to the technology used to build shelves that could store high loads at great heights, as well as the apparatus needed to lift loads onto higher shelves.

Before the lift truck, the main way to lift a heavy load was the same pulley systems that had been used for thousands of years.

When the forklift was invented, this started to change the fundamental shape of the warehouse by allowing loads to be moved far more easily and quickly, creating the foundations of a logistics system.

This was enhanced by the development of a compatible, easy-to-construct and easy-to-recycle pallet system, which enabled the standardisation of goods and an end to an era of difficult-to-handle bulk cargo, although both concepts still exist to this day.

Pallets allowed for standardised quantities of goods to be easily loaded and unloaded, and once forklifts were designed to be compatible with this, it led to the development of adjustable shelving systems and later pallet racking designs.

This allowed forklifts to effectively load and unload without the requirement of additional people or equipment, and as the warehouse process became more efficient, the limiting factor for how much a warehouse could effectively store was no longer based on the shelving but the capabilities of the forklift.

By the 1950s, narrow-aisle forklifts allowed palletized goods to navigate tight spaces with less difficulty, meaning that racking and shelving units could be placed closer together but still be accessible to a forklift.

Reach trucks then allowed forklifts to reach higher, and since this point, it has been a matter of scale, sophistication and advanced technology to avoid disruptions in the process.

For more information on How Did Warehouse Racking Shape Forklifts And Vice Versa? talk to UK Shelving Ltd