Products
Choose the systembefore the steel
Racking, mezzanines, cantilever and protection — designed, engineered, supplied, installed and certified by one team. Start here: which system your building actually wants, and what each one costs you somewhere else.
The choice
Density is bought with access
No system gives you both. Every layout sold in this province sits somewhere on that line, and the only bad answer is the one chosen without knowing which end it sits at.
| Direct access | Density | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting at one pallet | Every pallet is reachable from an aisle. Nothing is moved to get at anything else. | The front pallet only. What is behind it comes out first, or waits its turn. |
| Pallets per square metre | The lowest of any layout. The aisles take the floor the pallets could have had. | The highest, and it climbs as the lanes get deeper. |
| Aisles | The most of any layout — a service aisle for every one or two rows. | Fewer, and mobile racking closes them until only the one in use is open. |
| Throughput | High, and it does not depend on how the stock happens to be arranged. | Set by the system. Pallet flow is quick; drive-in and mobile racking are not. |
| Stock rotation | Yours to decide, pallet by pallet. | Decided by the geometry. Pallet flow is loaded at one end and picked at the other; push-back and drive-in are worked from the same face. |
| Relative install cost | The lowest. There is nothing in the bay but frames, beams and anchors. | Higher, and it rises with the mechanism — rails, carts and moving bases cost more than steel that stands still. |
| Contact risk | The truck stays in the aisle. Damage collects at row ends and at the foot of the uprights. | In drive-in and drive-thru the truck goes inside the structure, so contact is expected rather than exceptional. |
That last row is the one that vanishes from a quote and reappears on the floor. The denser the system, the more of the driving happens inside the steel — so the layouts that save the most floor are the ones that need guards and row-end protection drawn in at the design stage, anchored, and set at the height the damage actually happens. How rack protection gets specified
The systems
Where each one fits, and where it does not
Seven answers to the same question. Read the last line of each — the one that says when it is the wrong choice — because that is the half that decides it.
- Single-deep — one pallet from the aisle
- The easiest access there is and the lowest density there is. Any pallet, any time, nothing shuffled. Wrong when the floor is the constraint and you hold many pallets of few products.
- Double-deep — two pallets from the aisle
- Density up, aisle count down, and it needs a reach truck to get at the second pallet. Half the positions sit behind another pallet, so it wants products you hold in pairs. Wrong for a catalogue of single pallets.
- Drive-in and drive-thru — the truck goes inside
- The most pallets per square metre of any static system. Drive-in is loaded and emptied from one face; drive-thru is filled at one end and picked at the other. Wrong for a varied catalogue — a lane holds one product.
- Push-back — the lane feeds itself forward
- Worked from a single aisle, on carts that roll forward as a pallet leaves. Denser than double-deep without buying a second aisle. Last in, first out. Wrong where a date code has to leave in the order it arrived.
- Pallet flow — first in, first out, by gravity
- Loaded at one end, picked at the other, and the lane empties in the order it filled. The answer for perishables and for anything carrying a date. Wrong where you hold too few pallets per product to fill a lane.
- Mobile — the aisle moves, not the pallets
- The rows run on rails and close against each other, so the building carries one open aisle instead of a dozen. High density, low throughput. Wrong where the aisle is in use all day.
- Cantilever — nothing in front of the load
- Arms fixed to vertical columns, with end stops so nothing rolls off, for pipe, rod, sheet and carpet rolls. No upright stands between the truck and the load, which is the whole point. Wrong for anything that sits happily on a pallet.
Two of the five lines OTS builds sit outside that taxonomy, for different reasons. Cantilever is in the list above by courtesy: the Québec prevention guide treats it as a separate family rather than a pallet rack, because what it holds never sat on a pallet in the first place. Industrial Mezzanines are not in it at all, because a mezzanine is not a way of storing pallets — it is a floor, engineered as a structure in its own right, for a building that has run out of footprint and not out of height.
Under the paint
What decides what a bay carries
Not the colour and not the catalogue number. Two components and about a dozen variables — and a buyer who knows them reads a quote instead of comparing prices.
The upright frame
- The shape, the width and the gauge of the column section
- The properties of the steel, and how the section was formed
- Where the beam attaches to the column, and how
- How high the first horizontal brace sits above the floor
- How the horizontals are spaced going up
- The diagonals and horizontals themselves, and how they are fixed
- Whether the row stands alone or is tied back-to-back to another
- Anchors into the floor — recommended in every case where lift trucks work the aisle
- Galvanizing, where the environment is corrosive
The beam level
- The shape of the section — two profiles cover most of what is installed
- Its width, its length and its gauge
- The properties of the steel, and how it was formed
- The connector at each end, and the safety pins that lock it down
- Safety bars, which stop a load falling and are not built to carry one alone
- Support bars, which are — for the pallet that cannot sit on two beams
Most of that list has two families of answer. Roll-Formed Racking is cold-formed from thin-wall open sections. Structural Racking is bolted from structural steel. The two are told apart by section shape, width, gauge, steel properties, forming process and where the beam attaches — which makes the choice a design decision, taken against your loads, your trucks and your building, rather than a preference.
How a project runs
One team, drawing to attestation
Needs assessment, engineered design, supply, installation, conformity attestation. Five steps, one contract, and the same engineering office at both ends of it.
The needs assessment
What you store and what it weighs, what moves it and what that equipment needs to work in, and what the building will take. Where there are no building drawings, the area is measured and drawn to scale first.
Engineered design, sealed
Drawings and specifications prepared, signed and sealed by an engineer. The calculations account for the handling equipment, for lateral forklift impact, and for the seismic conditions of your site.
Supply
The system is supplied to the sealed drawings — frames, beams, bracing, anchors, bars and guards — so what arrives on site is what was calculated.
Installation
Erected by crews used to racking, with fall prevention planned rather than improvised. The racking stands on its own: fixing it to the building structure is avoided unless the building was designed for it, and frames are anchored to the floor wherever trucks work.
The conformity attestation
Before the first pallet goes in — verticality, alignment and anchoring verified, any deviation from the drawings approved by the engineer and recorded on as-built drawings, load plaques posted. A rack carries its rating only if it is installed plumb and level.
The drawing, the crew and the attestation are one file.
No handover between the company that sold the racking and the company that has to certify it. The engineering is sealed by an OIQ-member engineer at Optim-Structure, our sister engineering firm — the same office that seals your inspection report a year later.
The file does not close at handover. The same team inspects the racking it installed, recalculates it when a beam moves or a level is added, and repairs it when a truck finds it. That is a different service on a different page, done by the same people. Inspection, capacity and repair
FAQ
Questions we get
We design it, engineer it, supply it, install it — with our own crews or contracted ones — and certify it. One contract and one set of drawings, from the needs assessment to the conformity attestation. The engineering is sealed by an OIQ-member engineer at Optim-Structure, our sister engineering firm.
Often, and it is worth asking before you price new steel. Every component has to be examined by a competent person, anything damaged or of doubtful compatibility set aside, and the capacities determined so the permissible configurations are known — all of it before the racking goes back into service. One caution: mixing new and used components from different manufacturers can have consequences for their warranties.
What you store and what it weighs, what handles it, and what the building is — dimensions, columns, doors, sprinklers and the floor. If there are no building drawings, we measure and draw to scale. Two things stay with you: verifying the floor can carry the loads the racking puts into it is the owner's responsibility and may itself need an engineer, and establishing the seismic site class can call for a geotechnical report.
Yes, and it is not a job for a wrench and an afternoon. Moving beams or adding a level changes what the structure carries, so it takes an engineer's approval or certified documents before the work and re-certification after it. Moving a run to another building goes through the same process as a new installation, with new drawings and new load plaques.
Install cost is one of six things that change with the system, and the only one that shows up on the quote. The others show up on the floor plan: how many aisles you keep, how many pallets fit, how fast they move, whether stock can leave in the order it arrived. A bay that costs less and needs two more aisles is not the cheaper building.
Related
Next step
Bring us the problem not the part number
One call with an advisor — your stock, your trucks, your building — and you leave knowing which systems are worth pricing.