INSIGHTS
5/25/2021

5 SIGNS THAT YOUR SHOP NEEDS LEAN SHEET METAL STORAGE

LEAN Manufacturing Products

Wooden pallet storage is a thing of the past. With companies focusing on their environmental impact more than ever, they need to re-approach the way they store their material. Lean Manufacturing Products are sustainable and create cost savings across your entire business.

1. Wooden pallets stacked up at your facility

Tired of wooden pallets stacking up on the floor?

As today’s “industry standard,” steel is shipped to fabricators on wooden pallets. At LEAN, we challenge that “standard.” In fact, we believe wood has no place in a METAL fabricator’s building!

How much do you currently pay for your material to arrive on wooden pallets?

Many facilities either don’t know or think it’s just an unavoidable cost. But as the purchasers, you should understand these costs, and also understand what you can do to minimize them.

On average, we’ve found wooden pallets cost $35-$80 each, which adds up very VERY quickly. If you could save that money, how would you choose to re-invest it?

Replacing wooden pallets is exactly what we accomplish with our patented cartridges designed specifically to better protect the material and employees. Together, let’s say goodbye to the wood, and hello to the cost-saving LEAN cartridges!

Does this look familiar? $50 per pallet adds up fast!

Cantilever racking is unsafe and buries the material you need for your next job. Eliminate your cantilever racking, and implement a Lean Storage System to create more space on your manufacturing floor.

A clean and efficient sheet metal storage area creates efficiencies across your entire supply chain.

2. Stacks of raw materials cover your floor space

Is your shop limited on space? Do you process a high volume of sheet metal on a weekly basis? Does the raw material storage footprint seem to be continuing to grow every quarter?

Faster lasers and punches offer additional capacity. To fill the capacity, you need material. And for material, you either need a LOT of space, or you need a high-density storage system to keep inventory organized, accessible, and contained.

The concept is very simple. Instead of storing raw sheet bundles on the floor, on cantilever racking, or standard pallet racking, we maximize the vertical space in your raw material bays to minimize the “sprawl” that faster cutting machines and increased customer demands have caused in the industry with our top of the line sheet metal storage shelves.

Need storage solutions for raw materials?

The Final Result

Freed up floor space, more room for fork operators, increased organization, and easy access to any stack of material!

Time is money! Lean Manufacturing Products workswith you to curate the perfect sheet metal storage system to support your operations and continued growth.

3. Operators searching for, then unburying the material they need

Lean Sheet Metal Storage System custom built by Lean Manufacturing Products replaces old cantilever racking and creates more space on your shop floor to support growth year after year.

How much time do you waste over-handling material? How much does that cost?

If you perform a time-study for a two-week period, you might be shocked at how quickly the time spent (thus, $$) adds up!

Example Time Study: let’s say over the course of an 8-hour shift, an operator spends 55 minutes locating and then unburying the material he or she needs for today’s various jobs. Do you run two shifts? If yes, let’s double the 55 minutes to 110. Then x5 days/week = more than 9 hours per week, or 476 hours per year!! With our help, we can reduce that significantly by having all material organized and independently accessible.

That’s just a quick example, and it bodes the question: How would you choose to utilize the newly created labor hours? You haven’t hired any additional people, but yet you have significantly increased the billable hours on your shop floor.

Operators waste time finding and unburying the material they need by using cantilever racking. Lean Sheet Metal Storage Systems consolidates sheet metal storage and creates cost savings year after year.

At LEAN, we provide solutions that eliminate as much time wasted as possible. We know that companies with a Lean mindset will realize the drastic increase of efficiency gained by using our storage racks when compared to the time wasted with traditional storage methods.

4. Machines not being fed to capacity while running

Have you recently invested in a new laser or other equipment?

With the development of fiber lasers, there have been some major changes in the speed/accuracy of cutting sheet metal. Their speed has truly changed the game! The faster cutting speeds mean they also need to be fed at a quicker rate to maintain maximum operating capacity.

And these machines are not cheap, so we need to maximize their beam time to meet (or beat) the budgeted ROI! To do you this, it’s absolutely necessary to have raw materials organized, staged, and ready to be loaded into your laser(s).

Our racks allow shops to have any thickness/type of material ready and accessible at a moment's notice. This makes staging/organization/labeling easy for anyone, even during shift changes. Thus, maximizing the time spent.

Lean Manufacturing Products creates a sustainable and streamlined process for handling your sheet metal material.

5. Safety concerns and damaged material

Have you had any safety incidents in the past year? We won’t share pictures, but we’ve heard of incidents with cantilever racking, broken pallets, and cuts from exposed corners. But the good news: all of these are avoidable!

And how many times have you seen damaged material? Whether it’s a bent corner that you need to program around, warped/stressed sheets that are problematic at both the lasers and the press brakes, or scratches from forklifts that need to be worked around… time & material = $$$!!

Again, the good news: these are avoidable!

Unsafe wooden pallet storage can be avoided by implementing a Lean Sheet Metal Storage System in your facility

Some of the most common risks that deal with sheet metal are:

Shifting/sliding sheets when moving stacks of sheets with a forklift

Tumbling loads when a wooden pallet snaps

Exposed corners for both employees and visitors

Scrapped material due to waviness, scratches, flared edges, bent corners, etc.

LEAN Sheet Metal Storage Solutions fixes these worries and allows you to focus on efficiency and profit.

SEEING IS BELIEVING:

Ask for a visit to our facility TODAY by reaching out to one of our project managers.

We are happy to show you around and introduce you to new ways to make your business more profitable.

Lean Storage Systems create efficiencies across your entire supply chain. Saving costs and creating more space to further support growth for your business.

View the LEAN Sheet Metal Storage Rack product page here > LEAN Sheet Metal Storage Racks

View the full LEAN Sheet Metal Storage Rack Image Gallery here > LEAN Sheet Metal Storage Rack Gallery

View our full product portfolio > LEAN Full Product Portfolio

DISCOVER YOUR LEAN SOLUTIONS.

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