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CARRYING RACKING SPARE PARTS ON SITE

Maintenance, Mobile Racking /

Key to maintaining safe rack systems and minimizing down time of your racking system Rack safety, minimize rack down time, regular rack inspections, categorizing damage and taking necessary actions are crucial for the warehousing industry. Companies cannot afford to have unsafe racking systems for many reasons. The consequences of rack collapses and accidents in your cold stores or warehouses have potentially catastrophic impacts on your business. Collapses or accidents can cause injury, fatality, loss of profit, disrupt your ability to service customers and damage business reputation. For a while now Barpro has been promoting the need for a holistic approach to maintain safe racking systems and addressing the potential issues above. Our range of after sales services, preventative maintenance and health and safety products and services do just that. A key part of this offer is for users of racking systems to carry spare parts on site. Why is this so important?? Users of racking systems should be inspecting their racks weekly. Furthermore, they say that racking accidents on site should be reported straight away, and the damage inspected immediately and categorized in accordance with their color code, red, amber and green. Reds are elevated risk damage where racks have been severely damaged and pallets in the affected area must be unloaded. Amber is where pallets don’t have to be unloaded straight away but no more pallets can be loaded. Greens are the damage is within limits and no action is required now but the damage should be monitored. If you don’t carry spare racking parts on site, you can wait up to 8 weeks for parts to be manufactured. Then you must schedule a team to come and do the repairs. This can put your operation under strain as a lot of operations are already short on storage capacity. Carrying the right parts on site a repair team can come in straight away and repair the damaged reds and ambers giving you access to those pallet locations. For mobile Bases & Racking superstructure Other services Barpro offers to keep your racking safe: • Rack Load Signs & Rack certification• Rack Safety Awareness and Inspection Training• Rack Inspection Tools• Rack Inspections• Rack repairs

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Barpro Storage Rack Safety Inspectors’ journey concluded

Rack Safety /

Barri-Leon’s training for his SARI qualification was interrupted by the COVID pandemic. His first formal training took place in the UK in May 2022. He attended a supplementary session in September 2022 and was told he had passed the examination in December 2022. Barri-Leon is South Africa’s only registered SARI (SEMA Approved Rack Inspector) as most South African manufactured racking is made to SEMA standards Barri offers a critical service to all local companies which use pallet racking. Barri-Leon can offer the following services. Barri-Leon is qualified to do rack inspections to SEMA standards.  Inspections can be done on a stand-alone basis or to check that a warehouse’s existing rack safety program is working correctly.  The UK has various Health and Safety systems to help companies with rack safety training. In South Africa, there is very little knowledge at warehouse level about rack safety and how to prevent collapses. Barri can train up to 4 people per day on site to recognise rack damage, assess its seriousness and record it using a simple administration system. Companies are encouraged to appoint a PRRS (person responsible for rack safety) to complete regular inspections and the necessary paperwork. A similar system has been in operation throughout the UK for over 20 years significantly reducing rack damage and collapses. Barri-Leon’s course means that the same benefits are now available in South Africa.  The training includes all the tools required to do rack safety checks.  Barri-Leon can be contacted on:  training@barpro.co.za   Office: 021 5529190  Mobile: 082 565 3970 You can also contact our offices on: Cindy (CPT): 021 5529190 Maxine (JHB): 011 392 1702 Melanie (DBN): 031 942 3200

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RACK LOAD NOTICE SIGNS

Pallet Racking /

Rack load notices are fixed to warehouse racking and contain all the critical information required to use the racking safely. Amongst other things the rack load notice should show the following. Rack supplier contact details. This allows staff to quickly contact the rack supplier for spares or inspections.    Maximum rack bay load.  A bay being defined as the space between two frames. The weight of the bottom pallet level is excluded if pallets are located on the warehouse floor.   Maximum uniformly distributed load per pair of beams. This will normally be 2 or 3 pallets of say 1000 kgs gross weight.  It doesn’t mean one pallet of 2000/3000 kgs gross.   Height from floor or ground beam to top of first beam and subsequent spacing between beam levels. The first beam level is critical factor in rack design and determines the maximum bay load. If the first beam level is moved upwards the bay load will decrease.    Preferably pallet dimensions and gross weight. Important in that oversized pallets can damage the rack frames. Overweight pallets can also be quickly identified.   Date supplied and some sort of project reference. This allows regular inspections to be organized. Ideally there should be a load sign on every run of racking. This is because different rack designs are frequently found in the same warehouse. The racks may look the same but have significantly different design loads.     Barpro Storage supplies rack safety and PRRS (Person Responsible for Racking Safety) training. But without the correct load notices it is not possible to check the racks properly as the bay and beam loads and levels are unknown. If there are no load notices in a warehouse, then the original rack supplier can be contacted and new rack load signs or the relevant information requested. If the original supplier is unknown, then an engineer with rack experience should inspect the racking and calculate the load sign information from first principles.  When requesting new load signs from the rack supplier make sure that the design pallet weight dimensions match what is currently stored on the racking and that the beam levels have not changed.    On a practical note, I have frequently found rack load notices to be incorrect as they can be attached as part of a “tick box” exercise and their accuracy not confirmed. On several occasions, the original rack load signs are on the racking, but the first beam level has been removed to accommodate higher pallets.  Beam levels must not be changed without the original supplier’s consent or sign off from an engineer. Once the beam levels have been changed, the existing load signs must be replaced with new ones. If you need additional information or have queries about rack load signs, please do not hesitate to contact us on either: CPT – 021 552 9190 JHB – 011 392 1702 DBN – 066 232 7363

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