Two3 on the 23rd: September Recap

September felt like one of those months where a bunch of different projects ended up proving the same point:

A good warehouse plan starts with the operation, not the product.

That came up in a few different ways this month. Rack selection, layouts, safety details, conversations with customers, even some of the content we made. Different projects, but the same basic idea. Figure out what actually needs to happen in the space first, then work backwards from there.

You know your operation... We respect that and we’re here to help plan around it.

Haden interrupted a few LinkedIn scrolls this month to talk about warehouse design.

The video was obviously a little more fun than your average warehouse planning conversation, but the point behind it is something we talk about all the time.

Nobody knows an operation better than the people working in it every day.

You know where things get backed up. You know which aisle is always a pain. You know where product actually moves versus where somebody thought it would move when the building was laid out five years ago.

Our job is to take all of that and help turn it into something that works.

By the time you see the finished rack, most of the important work has already happened. Measuring, talking through the operation, changing layouts, comparing products, figuring out what will actually fit and probably changing the layout again.

That is a big part of what turnkey means to us. Not showing up with one product and trying to make the operation fit around it.

Sometimes the answer is structural. Sometimes it isn’t.

We also spent some time this month talking about the difference between structural and roll-formed pallet rack.

And like most things in warehousing, there really isn’t a universal “this one is better” answer.

Pallet weight matters. Forklift traffic matters. Impact risk matters. The environment matters. What is going into the rack and how people are going to interact with it every day matters.

A Green Bay area project was a pretty good example.

The customer needed better organized storage in both their main warehouse and a freezer area. On the freezer side, structural rack made more sense because of the environment, product movement and the durability they needed long term.

Same building. Same customer. Two different storage areas that needed to be looked at differently.

It is easy to start a rack conversation with, “How much can we fit in here?”

Sometimes that is part of it.

But the better question is usually, “What does this system actually need to do once everything starts moving?”

That is where the real planning starts.

Not flashy. Still important.

Another project this month was a wire back panel install in Southeast Wisconsin.

Our crew installed panels across 14 bays of racking, with three panels per bay and 15 feet of coverage behind each storage area.

When pallet rack backs up to active manufacturing space, they have a job to do. They help keep stored product on the rack side and add some protection for the people and equipment working on the other side.

One of the things I have learned from spending more time around these projects is how much the little stuff matters.

The giant rows of rack get the photos. The smaller decisions are often the things people appreciate six months later when the warehouse is full and everybody is actually working around it.

Also, I ran a half marathon

This one has absolutely nothing to do with pallet rack.

I finished my first half marathon at the Strider Half Marathon in Milwaukee this month, and the Two3 team was nice enough to give me a little shoutout for it.

We share a lot of steel, installs, warehouses and project photos around here, so I figured I could sneak one running photo into the September recap.

Back to the warehouses next month.

Haden is our Bowling Tournament Champion! 

We traded warehouse layouts for bowling lanes and spent an afternoon enjoying a little friendly competition as a team. Congrats Haden! 

Coming up

We have plenty more going on heading into October.

More projects to break down, more warehouse problems to talk through and probably a few more attempts to make pallet rack interesting enough to interrupt your LinkedIn scroll.

That’s kind the fun of doing this.

There is a lot happening behind what eventually becomes a finished warehouse, and the more of that process we can actually show, the better.

Thanks for following along this month.

Happy Two3 on the 23rd.