Thinking about racking? Don’t until you talk to Stamina Handling about their half and half deal. Pay for half your racking on order and the other half 6 months after delivery interest free.
Stamina Handling has launched a new initiative to help racking buyers buy the right racking for the job. Often customers compromise on their racking specification due to budgeting requirements at the time of order. Generally racking is bought as part of a capital project and inevitably capital projects often go over budget so pressure is on to reduce the purchase price of the various constituents of the project. Racking does not escape this squeeze and the price gets reduced. Some of this is by reducing the margin of the supplier but the vast percentage of any reduction tends to be in reducing the specification.
The specification is generally reduced in a number of ways:
1) By buying used equipment.
2) By compromising on the capacity of the equipment.
3) By not planning for future maintenance issues.
Buying used equipment
Buying used equipment from a reputable source in itself should not be a problem so long as certain precautions are taken however inevitably the used equipment will often be a compromise. Chris Williams sales director of Stamina says:
“I once had a customer who was storing a mix of euro pallets and UK pallets and the optimum solution was to supply a beam size to accommodate both with minimal wastage space (i.e. 3600mm) however when ready to place an order the powers that be demanded a 20% reduction in all capital equipment purchased. The solution appeared to be to buy second hand equipment however the only racking available at the time was 2250mm beams which meant a loss in effective capacity of 10% due to the wastage when storing Euro pallets. The pressure from above was such that they chose the secondhand options and from now on have to pay for all the warehousing costs with 10% less capacity.”
Compromising on the capacity
Frequently at the start of a project a warehouse manager will want a belt and braces specification often over specifying just for the sake of it however there are good arguments to increase the specification. All new racking generally sold in the UK meets very high standards set out by SEMA or its European parent body FEM and there are ample save guards built into the capacities quoted by reputable manufacturers. However the deflection in a beam when fully loaded is allowed to be 1mm in 200mm. Over a fairly standard 2700mm beam this is 13.5mm or just over half an inch on larger beams obviously this distance is greater. While still safe at these deflections it can look wrong and many choose to up spec the beams to minimise the deflection.
Another way that specifications can get downgraded is where the maximum pallet weight maybe be say 1000kgs but the average weight maybe considerably less so often the frame duty is reduced to take the average while still allowing the beams to take the maximum pallets.
Not planning for future maintenance issues
With careful planning at the design stage long term maintenance costs can be reduced this can be in a number of ways such as double blot fixing every upright to minimise twist in an upright, by installing sacrificial legs to reduce costs when uprights need changing and by installing a high quality rack protection system. These options often get thrown out when the final negotiations on price take place due to the budgeting constraints.
The Solution
Stamina in conjunction with its main suppliers and financiers have looked at ways in these compromises can be avoided. One of these solutions is the half and half deal. In its simplest form the buyer pays for half the racking initially and half 6 months after delivery interest free. There are conditions but they are not as restrictive as other finance solutions. Alternatively an element of the second half can be rented in conjunction with a maintenance contract, this rented element can then be treated as a revenue spend as opposed to a capital spend thus avoiding long capital expenditure approval procedures in large organisations. Currently Stamina are also offering a price matching service on like for like quotes based on an exact like for like specification again terms and conditions apply.
