There aren’t many opportunities to compare storage solutions to the fun of carnival rides, so we do love talking about vertical carousels. A vertical carousel gives your stuff a chance to ride a storage Ferris wheel. There are also benefits for your business and your people. Let’s look at the advantages across industries of vertical carousel storage.
No matter what they are storing, all vertical storage solutions focus on space, safety and efficiency. Maximizing your storage capacity while minimizing the space required, vertical carousels are power operated to bring your stuff to you:
- Industrial carousels can be customized to suit your small parts, heavy tools or long and bulky goods
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Healthcare environments use vertical carousels to corral wheelchairs and hospital beds or expedite access to medical supplies
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Office carousels simplify supply, file or media storage
We’ll talk more about the specific applications below, but first consider these advantages that benefit any industry:
- Maximize floor space — using available vertical height can create up to 60% more capacity in a compact storage system
- Improve productivity — enjoy access to what’s needed in just seconds instead of having to bend, stretch or climb to get your stuff
- Control and monitor inventory — intelligent control systems are available to interface with your computers and peripheral devices to give you transparency into the stuff you store
- Enhance employee experience — items are delivered to your staff with ergonomics in mind to avoid injuries and support improved safety
Vertical Carousel Uses Within Each Industry
Patterson Pope has installed vertical carousels in industrial, healthcare and office environments. Read on to learn about the many applications of an automated materials handling and storage system.
Industrial Applications
Every industry seeks to corral costs while expanding agility. Find cost efficiencies while optimizing space, enhancing ergonomics, and improving inventory accuracy and security with vertical carousels for industrial use.
Make productive use of overhead and vertical space storing items in Rotomat automated industrial vertical carousels that rotate to deliver stored goods, parts and items to a work counter at an optimal ergonomic height.
Your employees can conveniently collect and store everything from small parts to bulky items with greater efficiency too. Saving them from having to walk through aisles and bending or climbing to retrieve what they need also enhances your efficiency.
When Hirschvogel Incorporated (HVI), a Columbus, Ohio-based subsidiary of Germany’s Hirschvogel Automotive Group, wanted to leverage the vertical carousels other locations were using it was initially frustrated by ceilings only 15 feet tall. But that didn’t stop them from adding three Hanel Lean-Lift vertical carousels to optimize their storage of tooling, maintenance and production components for finished automotive parts. They installed three carousels (two 35-foot and one 53-foot) on its facility’s outer wall.
The push-button vertical storage carousel convenience is also enjoyed in bike shops, office or residential buildings, or police departments that want to use high ceilings to good use for wall mounted bike lifts.
Vidir’s vertical carousels bring benefits to vinyl, garment, wire, carpet and more in manufacturing, retail and warehouse environments. Their tire carousels can be configured to tires for cars, trucks, buses, RVs, aircraft and military vehicles. Combine the carousel with three sizes of overhead tire lifts that can hold 24, 36 or 48 tires per unit.
Tires aren’t the only heavy goods Vidir is equipped to handle. Their carousels and sheet metal lifts are suited to long and heavy goods. Handling carriage loads up to 5,000 pounds, the vertical lifts paired with automated storage and retrieval can save space, prevent damage and decrease the time taken to deposit and retrieve many types of industrial material.
Healthcare
Supply storage is costly for healthcare facilities. Yet, carousel storage takes patient supplies, surgical instruments or pharmaceutical storage vertical, leveraging otherwise underutilized space. With the possibility of single-floor or multi-floor, carousel storage can shrink the footprint needed for storage by up to 60%.
The right storage solution can also help with cost savings and regulatory compliance. Keeping wheelchairs and hospital beds organized and out of the way makes it easier to protect these investments and ensure a positive patient experience. Different carousels can house six regular powered wheelchairs or up to six folded wheelchairs for easy, safe storage and retrieval. Vidir’s bedlifts come in customizable sizes to add efficiency and efficacy to hospital bed storage.
Take AnMed Health, SouthCarolina’s largest independent, not-for-profit health system. Its facilities had extra beds and even at the distribution center beds were difficult to access with a manual racking system and forklift required to load and unload them. Installing a bedlift storing as many as five beds vertically made a real difference. “It’s saved us a lot of room and a lot of labor costs,” said Bobbie Elrod, environmental services operations manager at AnMed’s main campus.
Yet not every item in healthcare is big and bulky. There are lots of small items needed to supply medical staff too. The Hanel Rotomat is a convenient addition whether it's housing pathology specimens, pharmaceuticals, surgical instruments in sterile processing or patient care supplies.
Florida’s Naples Community Hospital Healthcare Northeast Emergency Department enjoys being able to store things like gloves, syringes, IV solutions, pharmacy backup, hoses and bandages with row and bin specificity on the carousel. Stocking and retrieval are more convenient and efficient, and they saved money with fewer restocking deliveries during the week.
It helps that these units can be enclosed and locked to secure valuable inventory. Further protections include password access, keycard swipe or RFID readers.
Along with inventory control, the carousels support compliance too. Storing instruments in vertical carousels helps Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel meet the environmental standards of OSHA, AAMI and other similar organizations.
Office Storage
Vertical office carousels automate storage and retrieval of everything from lightweight contact lenses in an optometrist’s office to bulky mortgage documents in a lender’s office. With touch-button retrieval, the carousel brings your stuff to you — and in just seconds.
The carousel saves your staff from bending, ladder-climbing or walking long distances to search for and store stuff. With the carousel, required items are automatically delivered at the optimum ergonomic retrieval height.
The Rotomat vertical office carousel also comes with an available inventory management system that helps accurately track stored items. Simplify supply management with the ability to build pick lists and project inventory surplus or depletion with data from your storage solution.
Vertical carousel options are available to suit hanging folders, binders, X-ray pictures, data tapes, microfiche, letter and legal files, card index boxes and much more. Plus, we can tailor office carousels to adapt to your inventory or provide a customized all-in solution.
Value Your Vertical Space
Vertical carousel products let you fully leverage your space while improving productivity and inventory control and offering your people a safer, more ergonomically friendly way of working. Browse the many vertical carousel products Patterson Pope offers to find the solution that suits your needs. Get in touch with our storage experts for more information. If you really want, we could even meet at a carnival to talk about your storage objectives — the cotton candy’s on us.
