Warehouse Racking Labels

Avoid Costly Mistakes with an Effective Warehouse Racking Labelling System 

When you first sit down and look into the possibility of streamlining your Warehouse Management best practice, what’s the first thing you think of? There are, of course, many ways you can do this. Warehouse managers often go straight to shiny and expensive new tech, but what if we were to tell you that there is a simpler - and much more cost efficient - way to do this? One of the most underrated principles is to make sure your Warehouse Locations and Bin Labels are working as well as they should be.

Selling more products, getting more merchandise picked, packed and out the warehouse door is important to you. Having an effective Warehouse Racking solution will help you avoid miss-ships, reduce errors and man-hours through the whole process. Maybe it’s time you gave it the once over.

Show Some Love for your Locations!

Despite being often difficult and, frankly, confusing, the industry standards do exist for a reason! After literally decades of trial-and-error in the warehouse, the industry moved to determine a set of best practices. These guidelines included standards for how and when labelling locations need to be monitored, as well as what this system should ultimately look like.

This doesn’t mean there is no room for customisation or personalisation, however. Just that standardisation makes things significantly easier for everyone involved.

Where do I start with Warehouse Racking?

A good place to start is at the beginning. There are so many ways to go about implementing a new Warehouse Racking system, so let’s look at some of the terminology involved in your potential new system. 

One of the most important things to do when starting out is to decide on a naming schema that works for you and your business and BE CONSISTENT.

Aisle - An aisle is the topline location, which is typically defined as the walking space between your racks. Aisles are usually assigned numbers in ascending order to differentiate them.

Rack - A rack can be described as a large section of shelving units that store your products. Depending on the size of the warehouse, racks span down an entire side of, or as small sections of shelving within, the aisle.  

Shelf - Each shelf is the individual horizontal space spanning the width of a rack. These are typically organised in numerical order from the floor up. 

Location - A location is a designated area in a warehouse where a picker goes to retrieve the product(s) for order or shipping. Typically identified with an consecutive alphanumeric barcode, all locations  

Bin - If the location has very small items, each location may contain several smaller individual ‘bins’. Bins are often not labelled separately, but this could often prove to be a costly mistake.  

A simple test to know if the naming convention gives good guidance is to be able to describe the layout to someone who does not know the warehouse and to then give them a bin location and check that they can instantly find it. 

Warehouse Racking in Practice

Warehouse Racking Labels is a tricky business at the best of times. The organisation of location codes, as well as what these areas are called can differ greatly from warehouse to warehouse. With that being said, the following is generally considered to be best practice.

Number Shelves from the Ground Up

The most basic principle of naming your shelves. This exists so that if your company grows and the number of products you sell increases, you will ultimately need a greater quantity of shelves. You can simply build up this way, adding more shelves to the top of the rack. You will not need to restructure your Warehouse Racking labels each time you add to it.  

Consistency is Key

Nothing will mess with your system more than mixed messages! An inconsistent system of Warehouse Racking labelling will mean that your employees will waste valuable time trying to do manually what you pay a lot of money to have systems set up to do. 

Start with a Zero

Much in the same vein as previously discussed, always start your Warehouse Racking labelling with a 0. This means in an alphanumeric system; the first location is 01 rather than just 1. Not including this zero restricts you to 9 locations before the picking system starts to get confused!   

Location Labelling 

You are not going to need the same Warehouse Racking labelling solution as other warehouses. For example, a company that sells large petrol lawnmowers will rely more on aisles and shelves. In contrast, a company that sells CPU’s or laptop motherboards will have a system designed with bins in mind. The latter may have thousands of bins spread out over a smaller area, whereas the former will have fewer physical items that still need to be found just as efficiently.  

Rack Labelling

The most common style of rack labelling is the ‘standard’ system in which all racks are ordered similarly from one end of the warehouse to the other in ascending order (north to south, for example). The alternative is the ‘serpentine’ system in which they are alternated. This means that picking systems can select a more efficient route and allow pickers to weave (like a serpent if you will) up and down the aisles without wasting time travelling back to one end. Increasingly, warehouse managers are preferring the serpentine warehouse racking labelling system.

Shelf Labelling

The industry preferred method of labelling your shelves is ‘section’, usually ordered vertically and in ascending value.

The process of labelling up all of your Shelves, Racks, Locations, Bins and Aisles can take a while, and the costs can spiral out of control. Depending on the size and scale of your warehouse, you might have to pay for thousands and thousands of labels to be printed. Particularly if you expand your product range and warehouse, or if you want to move locations around.

We can provide a set of Labels for any of your needs, or provide a Printer and Consumables, allowing you to run off all the labels you could need.  

That’s Where We Come In....  

Zygology Systems has great experience in long-lasting, durable warehouse labelling. From Pallet Racking Labels, Warehouse Shelving Labels, Rack Labels, Reflective Warehouse Labels, End-of-Aisle Labels, Warehouse Racking Labels, Warehouse Warning Labels and Warehouse Safety Labels through to Floor Marking Tapes.

With the right labels and warehouse management systems in place, Racking and pallet locations can be found quickly making operations smoother and more cost effective. What’s not to love?   

We can customise your warehouse labels with your choice of graphics, text, holograms, tamper-proof technology or obviously, more commonly, a wide variety of barcode formats etc.

We often manufacture warehouse labels with barcode labels such as;

• EAN8, EAN13, UPC & ISBN – for retail applications
• Code 39 for industrial applications including sequential information
• Code 128 for industrial applications sequential information
• ITF14 – for shipping & traded units
• Datamatrix, PDF417, QR Codes & Circular format Barcodes

Speak to one of our friendly experts on 01628 520440 today about your warehouse labelling requirements, or fill in the contact form below.