Elevating Rack Guards

Elevating Rack Guards Overview

Modern warehouse facilities perpetually seek out ways to increase their storage capacities, either by expanding their footprints, elevating their stack heights, or increasing their storage density inwards. In all cases, increasing product volumes are typically accompanied by increasing traffic volumes, product touches, and material movements as well. All of this accelerating activity puts pressure on warehouse safety, challenging facility managers and engineers to keep ahead of potential risks by implementing safe work practices, procedures, and protective equipment.

Elevating Rack Guards are one increasingly popular solution in warehouse safety, given their ease of installation, economical cost, and functional benefits offered. These Elevating Rack Guards, or ERGs, are installed on the pick faces of storage racks. ERGs can be independently raised and lowered– raised when pick access is needed and lowered to contain products at
other times.

Fig. 1- Elevating Rack Guards

ERGs fall under the category of Rack Guard Netting products, along with other safety products such as storage rack side netting, end netting, and overhead netting. InCord’s line of Rack Guard products are made from High Tenacity Polypropylene materials and are secured with structural extensions, angles, mounting brackets, and hardware to existing racks with minimal effort. These guards are customizable in aspects such as material and color.

Read more about Warehouse Rack Safety in this previous article.

ERG Applications

Elevating Rack Guards are installed to address several specific warehouse safety hazards, including:

Employee Safety

ERGs offer warehouse employees and managers alike a safer storage environment by providing a physical barrier between workers and the products stored on racking overhead. Materials that are loosely packaged, not fully contained, oddly shaped, unsecured, or that otherwise pose a risk of falling from their storage positions overhead risk striking employees below, as well as creating hazards for fork trucks and other warehouse vehicles. Rack Guards deter material falls by securely covering the open face of rack positions, holding back products within their storage bays.

Push-Through Protection

Multi-depth rack rows present a particular risk of falling products when materials on one side can be struck by material picks occurring on the opposite side. Push-through or pick-through impacts such as these can cause materials on an otherwise empty aisle to come crashing down from overhead, since the forklift or person causing the impact is in the opposite aisle. This hazard is one of the main reasons that Elevating Rack Guards are installed, providing near-complete protection on pick faces from product impacts occurring in adjacent aisles.

Note: Netting products are rated by various force limits depending on material, racking attachment, and other factors – check your application’s requirements with the factory before ordering. In applications where a very forceful push-through hazard exists, and netting would need to withstand full forklift force, special specifications or other higher-strength alternatives may be recommended.

Fig. 2- ERG Operation

Secondary Identification

We recently discovered a creative application for ERGs beyond product protection at one of our customer’s sites. The customer had ordered various color netting for their ERGs, and we discovered that they were using the various colors as a means of visual identification and employee communication in their racking scheme. Certain colors were used to identify different lots by production day or shipping day, as well as to designate ‘full’ and ‘partial’ pallet locations for staging between production runs. Inventive secondary functions like this make Elevating Rack Guards all the more useful in warehouse operations, on top of the robust safety benefits they naturally provide.