Pharmaceutical & medical
Show the recordbefore they ask twice
Inspection, capacity certification and repair for pharmaceutical and medical sites in Québec. The work is planned around rooms that cannot stop, and every sealed report lands in one place with the current one flagged.
The building
What gets audited is the record
Everything about how the work is scheduled here follows from that one fact.
Somewhere in a pharmaceutical or medical warehouse, somebody eventually asks a question and starts a clock. It is rarely whether the racking was inspected. It is who signed the report, what date it carries, whether the bay damaged in March was repaired, and where all of that lives. Most of the delay in answering is retrieval, not remediation.
It is also a building that does not stop. A cold room holds its conditions whether or not anyone wants to walk it with a clipboard, and a qualified location does not get emptied for a morning because a calendar said so. So the inspection is planned around the rooms rather than the rooms around the inspection, and the sections that genuinely have to come off load are picked out of your layout beforehand.
And what is in the bay changes what a finding costs. Taking a location out of service in a controlled room is not only a structural decision — it is a decision about where lot-controlled stock goes while the repair is made, and about the record that has to show it moved.
On site
Where the method changes
The standard is the same one every warehouse in Québec is measured against. Five things about this building change how it gets applied.
- One building, more than one interval
- CSA A344 puts specialist inspection at annually as the general case, then hands the real frequency to a risk assessment. Temperature, humidity and a corrosive atmosphere are named factors in that assessment — which is why a cold room, a wash-down area and the ambient aisles down the corridor do not automatically share a date.
- Cold rooms are inspected in service
- Racking is graded against what it carries when it is full, so most of the walk happens with the room running and the door shut. What has to come off load — a section where a permanent deformation must be measured, a drive-in or drive-thru tunnel that cannot be judged from the aisle — is identified from your layout beforehand and scheduled.
- Your controlled documents do half the work
- CSA A344 asks that current rack drawings, operating procedures, handling-equipment specifications and product load details be given to whoever inspects. Most warehouses have to go looking for two of the four. A site under document control usually has all of them, which is why an inspection here starts further along than it does anywhere else.
- A moved beam is a change to a certified structure
- Beams get moved to fit a new tote or a new case height, usually by somebody being helpful. CSA A344 does not permit a rack to be reconfigured without an engineer's approval or certified documents, and a modified structure has to be re-certified. On a site that runs change control the shape is familiar: the work may be entirely sensible, and the record of it is what has to exist.
- Segregated runs get walked like everything else
- Quarantine, rejected stock, recalls and controlled substances sit in caged or locked runs with their own access and their own keyholder. They are inspected against the same list as the open aisles, and each finding is recorded by aisle and bay so the person who can open the cage knows where to go.
The OTS Portal
One screen, not a week of email
Every inspection, capacity report and repair certificate is filed by site and by year, with the current one flagged. When quality asks for the racking file — for an audit, an insurer, a new qualification — it is the same screen every time.
Certificates & reports
Distribution centre — Sainte-Julie
- Current
Annual inspection — 2026
Sealed 6 February 2026
- Archived
Capacity report — cold room B
Sealed 18 September 2025
- Archived
Repair certificate — aisle 7, bay 12
Sealed 3 November 2025
One list per site. The flag is what quality is looking for.
The systems
Rotation you can defend
Expiry dating makes first in, first out a requirement rather than a preference, and the Québec prevention guide names pharmaceutical products alongside food when it explains why a rack would be built for it. Two ways to get it, and they are not the same thing to own.
| Pallet flow | Drive-thru | |
|---|---|---|
| How the pallet moves | It travels. Loaded at one face, picked at the other, running on rails or rollers under gravity. | It sits. The truck enters the structure through one aisle and leaves through the other. |
| Rotation | First in, first out by construction — a pallet cannot be picked out of order. | First in, first out if it is loaded and picked that way. The discipline is operational, not structural. |
| What it costs in floor | Fewer aisles than front-loading racking, so more of the room is stock. | Fewer again. The best storage density per square metre of the static types. |
| Contact risk | The truck stays in the aisle. Nobody drives into the structure. | The truck is inside the structure, so contact risk is high and column guards have to be anchored to the floor. |
| What it costs to keep | Moving parts. Rails, rollers and brakes need more maintenance than a beam does. | No moving parts — but a tunnel cannot be assessed from outside, so inspecting it means partly emptying it. |
Neither is the whole building. Single-deep racking still holds the slow movers and the awkward sizes, because it gives the easiest access at the lowest density — and it is the part of the room where a beam is most likely to be moved to fit a new case height, which is a re-certification whether or not anybody treats it as one.
FAQ
Questions we get
Book the work and say so. Nobody is owed a perfect history; they are owed a straight answer and a programme with dates on it. If nothing on your racking carries an engineer's seal and nobody can say which standard it was built to, CSA A344 asks for it to be examined — to establish that the design met the standards in force when it was built and that seismic forces were accounted for. That is a capacity report, and it is what gives every inspection after it something to measure against.
Yes, and that is the normal case. Racking is graded against what it carries when full, so the walk happens with the room running. Two things need clearing rather than looking at: a section where a permanent deformation has to be measured off load, and a drive-in or drive-thru tunnel, which cannot be judged from the aisle. Both come off your layout before we arrive, so they land on a schedule rather than on the day.
The register is the right instinct — CSST recommends one, holding the dates of the daily observation, the dates and observations of the planned inspections, and the dates of repairs and replacements. What a register usually does not do is carry the sealed report itself, say which version is current, or cover more than one building. The portal is that register with the documents attached and the current one flagged, per site.
Enough of one to have a document about it. A rack is certified in a configuration, and CSA A344 does not permit beams to be moved or a rack reconfigured without an engineer's approval or certified documents, because the change can create an overload the drawings never described. Any component modification or reconfiguration calls for the structure to be re-certified. The work itself may be entirely sensible; what has to exist is the calculation that says so.
Related
Talk it through
Get the racking on a schedule
Tell an advisor how many sites you run, how many controlled rooms are in them, and what is already documented. That is usually enough to scope it.