Blog: Horizontal Carousels: Workhorse of the Warehouse

Horizontal carousels provide low cost, high-productivity solutions for storage and retrieval in warehouses and distribution centers where vertical storage isn’t quite the right fit. Limited only by your floor space and your imagination, these storage workhorses may be just the thing you’re looking for, whether in production or fulfillment. Their cost-benefit ratio is often very compelling, particularly when compared to other goods-to-picker options. Here’s why:

Save Space in Your Current Area

Warehouse expansion isn’t always an option. When you need an efficient solution that’s able to reduce cubic storage requirements by 40% to 60%, carousels are a cost-effective solution. Because they also can be stacked and mixed and matched with other automated storage options, a carousel can help organize limited floor space for maximum efficiency.

Gain Flexibility and Adaptability

Horizontal storage allows different items—from small to bulky—to be stored compactly within the same unit as well as the flexibility to change when your business needs to adapt to seasonal or product offering changes. When you’re ready to expand, horizontal carousels can be arranged in dual, triple and quadruple stations or in multilevel stations to increase storage and allow one person to pick from multiple carousels.

Save Time While Increasing Productivity

Carousels are designed for fast, reliable and efficient high-speed picking. As each unit in a workstation spins to the first, second, or third pick, the operator can seamlessly move between them as items are quickly delivered. This flexibility can result in an increase in order picking throughput up to 600%. Because they effectively deliver goods-to-person, the practical and efficient storage and retrieval system of a horizontal carousel also can significantly decrease labor and warehouse costs while reducing product wait times.

Increase Efficiency and Accuracy

On average, a warehouse employee picks roughly 60 lines per hour. With a horizontal carousel, that productivity can increase to 200-600 lines per hour when interfaced with your ERP system. Current software platforms allow batching of orders, picking more than one order at a time to further increase productivity. Carousels also can help ramp up pick accuracy to over 99% when paired with a pick-to-light system that facilitates where to go, what to pick, and how many items to pick.

These workhorses perform at nearly 100% uptime thanks to their rugged construction and low-maintenance design. If you’re ready to take a leap into the future, carousels can be paired with an automated extractor to fully mechanize the retrieval process.

Horizontal carousels are an excellent entry point into automation if you are ready to test the waters. They can be especially useful in e-commerce settings for order fulfillment. A system can be customized based on height, width, weight capacity, and carrier configuration to be the perfect fit for your warehouse–and often provide an ROI in less than 12 months. Give us a call today, we’d be happy to analyze your space and order picking requirements to get you started.