Narrow-Aisle Selective Racks Boosts Warehouse Productivity for Rana Furniture

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About Rana Furniture

Rana Furniture has been in business since 2003 serving the Miami, Hialeah, Miami Gardens, Pembroke Pines, Sawgrass, Homestead, Cutler Bay, and Kendall. Born under the statement that “everyone deserves a beautifully furnished home”, their mission is to provide quality furniture at affordable prices. The company sells products of the most recognized names in furniture and mattresses: Ashley Furniture, Hughes Furniture, Coaster Furniture, Fabelli, ALF, Serta, Beuatyrest, Tempur amongst many other.

They constantly search new vendors around the World, looking to improve their product portfolio, attending the most important international shows each year, making certain to always find great quality solutions for customers. Today’s fine furniture is built in the United States, Indonesia, South America, Canada, Italy, and China, and it’s all available in their website and brick and mortar stores in South Florida.

The Situation

Rana Furniture has been achieving a constant annual growth rate over the years. Located in South Florida, where construction development has been booming after the COVID pandemic, has increased their customer demands to record highs. This has created the company the necessity for growth and expansion, in order to keep up with the high volume demands the market is requesting.

As the company faces expansion, Rana Furniture also looks out to new challenges like: the ability to store more product and optimize their warehouse space.

Rana contacted Atlantic Rack needing to relocate into a new warehouse and also requested help for replacing its old 16’ foot tall racking system for a 22’ foot tall. Typically, we recommend furniture stores to turn from selective racking to cantilever racks to store product, but due to the fireproofing requirements at Rana Furniture’s new warehouse, the company decided to install selective pallet racks instead. The furniture company also needed to be able to hand-load products in very narrow aisles since they needed to make the most use of the space in their new warehouse.

The Solution

Rana Furniture consulted pallet rack distributor Atlantic Rack to come up with several options for its storage needs. The team decided to install selective pallet racks with 7,656 pallet positions and 22’ foot high by 42” deep frames. The system also features 638 bays with four levels and 144” beams. Selective pallet racking is versatile and adaptable to any type of load, weight and volume, such as furniture. Its versatility makes it also suitable when storing the several thousand different SKU’s that Rana Furniture has for its products.

One important caveat for Rana Furniture was the need to increase warehouse productivity. One way of doing that was to incorporate some very narrow aisles into the design of the system. Eight of the system’s aisles are 6’ wide and one is 8’ wide. Workers use wire guided forklifts to navigate the narrow aisles.

The benefit of this type of layout is its efficiency because Rana Furniture can now hand-load and unload product with a third of the people that it was using at its previous warehouses, and with less product damage, according to Hector Rueda, operations manager for Rana Furniture. “It’s minimizing damage to the product a lot and it’s also boosting productivity. Before, workers used to be able to prepare one truck in maybe an entire day; now, the same operator prepares three trucks in a single day.” The system also has five aisles that are more than 19’ wide, which allows workers to move faster with larger furniture on pallets and without having to move loads individually.

Uninterrupted workflows

The plan for the future, however, is for workers to hand-load every piece of furniture, thereby eliminating the need for pallets and gas-powered forklifts and further reducing the risk of damage to the products. “Basically when a piece comes in, everything is hand-touched so workers can be delicate with every single piece of furniture that we have,” Rueda said.

The Rana Furniture warehouse is the company’s only distribution center. It always has a team of workers that is physically unloading product from overseas containers and another team that is constantly moving product from the receiving area and putting it in the rack. When picking orders, workers may have to go to several locations in several aisles to retrieve the required furniture. Initially, there were concerns that this would affect the flow of goods and cause bottlenecks in the narrow aisles. “Right now we have four stock pickers in receiving and four stock pickers in shipping and we really haven’t run into that problem,” Rueda said.

The investment in the new selective pallet rack system is definitely paying off. After moving into the new warehouse location, Rana Furniture was able to cut personnel expenses by 30 percent and still accommodate the opening of two new stores. “I think our people now can become so efficient that they can probably handle the two extra stores without problem” Rueda states.

Advantages of the new Racking System

Increased productivity: through the use of a more efficient layout with narrow aisles, workers are able to hand-load furniture into the selective rack quickly.
Less risk of damage to product: hand loading of furniture into the selective racking has enabled workers to handle goods more delicately and limit product damage.
Reduced costs: Rana Furniture saw a 30 percent reduction in expenses after installing selective racks with narrow aisles.