Alpha Omega Shelving supplied and installed selective pallet racking for Menard USA at their facility in Butler, Pennsylvania. The system uses Speedrack Products Group, Ltd. components and was installed out of our Carnegie warehouse.

The constraint on this project was floor space, which is the constraint on most of them. The building was the size it was, expanding it was not on the table, and the pallet count still needed to go up. That leaves two levers: use the height you already have, and lay the system out so the footprint does more work.

Height is the least expensive capacity in any warehouse. The cubic footage above a facility’s heads is already paid for in the lease or the mortgage, and most buildings use a fraction of it. Designing the system around the available clear height — rather than around what the previous layout happened to be — converts space that was already being rented into usable pallet positions.

Layout is the other half, and it is where the difference between an adequate system and a well-designed one shows up. Aisle placement, bay sizing and beam spacing together determine how many positions actually fit in a given footprint. Each decision looks minor on its own, and across a full building they compound into a meaningful difference in total capacity.

The result at Butler was more pallet positions in the same square footage, with no addition and no new lease. Selective racking keeps every pallet directly accessible, so the gain in density did not come at the cost of access. Alpha Omega Shelving designs, supplies and installs pallet racking throughout Butler County, Pittsburgh and the surrounding tri-state area from our facility in Carnegie, Pennsylvania.