Alkon Koala Pick Bins in India: The AKP Range, Sizes, Rails and Koala Shelving Units
Koala Pick Bins are the AKP series from ALKON Plastics Pvt. Ltd., and they exist for one job: presenting small parts to a human hand at an order-picking face. Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. has been an authorised stockist of ALKON for over thirty years, and in that time the most common mistake we see on a picking line is a bin chosen on internal volume alone. A pick bin is specified on how it hangs, how it nests when it goes back empty, how deep a hand can reach before the picker starts leaning, and whether the code you bought actually matches the pitch of the roll-post shelving already standing in your store. This page walks the AKP range end to end for buyers in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi NCR, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Nashik and Rajkot, and explains the decisions that make a Koala face work rather than merely look tidy.
What a Koala Pick Bin Actually Is, and Where It Sits in the ALKON Catalogue
The Koala Pick Bin is one of nine ranges in the ALKON catalogue of 476-plus products, and it is the range built specifically around the act of picking rather than around storage or transport. ALKON describes itself as the manufacturer of the largest range of material handling bins in India, and that range is not a marketing line so much as a practical problem for the buyer: with Supra, Hippo, Bull, Rhino Tuff, Tote, Mammoth, Panda, Koala and Roo all available from one source, the difficulty is no longer finding a bin, it is knowing which family your application belongs to. Koala Pick Bins belong to the family where a picker stands in front of a face, reads a pick list or a screen, reaches in, takes a quantity and moves on. Everything about the AKP geometry follows from that one motion.
Physically, the AKP series is a moulded polypropylene copolymer bin with an open front, a front lip that lets the hand enter without catching, and a full-length rear lip that runs the entire width of the bin's back face. That rear lip is the single most consequential feature in the range and we devote a whole section to it below, because it is what turns a loose bin into a hangable component. The material is PP with resin code 05, carrying food-safe and recyclable marks, and the working service range is minus ten to plus seventy degrees Celsius. In Indian conditions that range matters at both ends: a mezzanine picking floor under a sheeted roof in Ahmedabad or Rajkot in May sits well inside the upper limit, and a cold-chain ante-room or a pharma cold store in Pune or Hyderabad sits well inside the lower one, which is why the same bin code can travel across very different plants in the same group.
The smallest and most widely stocked size in the range is the AKP-01, at 130 x 105 x 60 mm outside and 105 x 90 x 55 mm inside. Those two numbers together tell you almost everything about how a pick bin is built. The outside length is 130 mm but the inside length is only 105 mm, a difference of 25 mm, and that difference is not wasted plastic. It is the front lip that supports the hand entry, the rear lip that carries the hanging load, and the wall section that survives being pulled and pushed a few hundred times a day. When a purchase manager compares a pick bin against a plain open-front box on internal volume alone, the pick bin looks inefficient. Once you understand that the missing 25 mm is the mounting system and the wear allowance, the comparison changes completely.
It also helps to place the Koala range against its siblings so that you do not use it where a different family is the right answer. If you need a straight open-front stacking bin for a store rack or a WIP buffer, the Supra range is the usual choice, and there is a dedicated page on the Alkon Supra Bins range for that. If you need a shelf-mounted bin with a hopper front for pharmacy or small-component shelving, the Panda Shelf Bin range starts at PSB 301 with a 315 x 100 x 60 mm outside footprint and runs up to 606. Koala is the range you specify when the bin will hang on a louvre panel, a rail or a Koala shelving unit, and when the hand approaching it is doing order picking rather than machine feeding.
Koala Bin Sizes: Reading the AKP Dimension Table Correctly
Every ALKON bin is quoted with an outside and an inside dimension, and the discipline of reading both is what separates a picking face that works from one that gets rebuilt after six months. For the AKP-01 the outside is 130 (L) x 105 (W) x 60 (H) mm and the inside is 105 x 90 x 55 mm. The outside number is the one that decides how many bins fit across a rail, across a louvre panel, or across a shelf in a Koala shelving unit. The inside number is the one that decides whether your part fits, how many pieces you can hold, and whether a partition will still leave a usable compartment. Buyers routinely plan layouts on inside dimensions and then find they are two bins short per rail, or plan capacity on outside dimensions and find the part will not drop in at all.
Take a worked example that comes up constantly in electronics and automotive component picking around Pune and Chennai. Suppose you are holding a small terminal block with a footprint of about 40 x 25 mm and a height of 30 mm, and you want roughly 200 pieces per bin at the face. In an AKP-01 the usable internal volume is 105 x 90 x 55 mm, but the practical fill height is not 55 mm. A picker's hand needs clearance to enter and close, so plan on filling to roughly two-thirds of internal height on a hand-pick bin, which gives you about 36 mm of working depth. With loose fill at a realistic packing efficiency, that footprint will not hold 200 pieces of that part in an AKP-01, and the honest answer is to move up the AKP series or accept a higher replenishment frequency. Doing that arithmetic before ordering is far cheaper than doing it on the shop floor.
The second habit worth building is measuring the part in its worst orientation, not its neatest one. Fasteners, clips and moulded plastic parts do not lie flat; they interlock, they bridge and they sit at angles. A part that measures 95 mm on its longest axis will theoretically go into a 105 mm internal length, but in a bin where twenty of them are jumbled it will jam diagonally against the corner radius and the picker will end up tipping the bin out. As a rule of thumb for pick bins, keep the longest part dimension to no more than about 80 per cent of the internal length, and if the part is rigid and straight, check it against the internal width too. A part that must be laid in a particular orientation to fit is a part that will eventually be laid in the wrong one.
Third, be explicit about which dimension you are calling length. ALKON quotes bins in the order that matches how they are used, so for a pick bin the first figure is the depth from the face into the shelf, the second is the width across the face, and the third is the height. For AKP-01 that means 130 mm goes into the rack, 105 mm is what the picker sees, and 60 mm is the front height. If your rack has 400 mm clear depth, two AKP-01 bins nose to tail do not fill it, and you must decide whether you are running a single-deep face with dead space behind, a double-deep face where the rear bin is a reserve, or a shallower shelf. That is a layout decision, and it is much easier to take with the outside depth written on the drawing.
The Full-Length Rear Lip: Why Koala Bins Hang and Ordinary Bins Do Not
The defining feature of the AKP range is the full-length rear lip. Instead of a small hook or a moulded tab at the top rear corner, the Koala bin carries a lip that runs the entire width of its rear face. When that lip drops over a louvre panel slot, a universal rail or a rail on a Koala shelving unit, the load path is spread across the whole back of the bin rather than concentrated at two points. This is the difference between a bin that stays square under load and one that gradually splays at the top, drops a corner, and eventually has to be pushed back into place by every picker who passes it.
The practical consequences show up in three places. First, load capacity in the hanging condition: a full-width lip lets you fill a pick bin with dense small parts, brass fittings, steel fasteners, machined inserts, without the bin deforming at the hanging line. Second, stability during the pick itself, because the picker does not just take from the bin, they pull it slightly, lean into it, and sometimes rest a hand on the front lip. A two-point hook resists that badly. Third, the ability to reposition. Because the lip engages continuously rather than at fixed hook centres, you can slide a Koala bin sideways along a rail to close a gap after a part is deleted from the range, which is exactly the maintenance a live picking face needs.
This also changes what you can build. A louvre panel with continuous horizontal slots plus full-lip bins gives you a face that is adjustable in both axes: vertically in slot pitch, horizontally in continuous increments. Compare that with a shelf-based face, where the vertical pitch is fixed by the beam or shelf positions and the only freedom you have is sliding bins along the shelf. For a picking face that changes as SKUs come and go, which is the normal state of any distribution operation in Bhiwandi, Navi Mumbai or the industrial belt around Ahmedabad, the louvre-and-lip combination is the one that survives change without fabrication work.
There is a failure mode worth naming. A full-length lip only performs if the panel or rail it engages is itself straight and properly fixed. A louvre panel mounted on an out-of-plane wall, or a rail fixed to a rack upright that has been knocked out of true by a pallet truck, will hold the bins at a twist. The bins will still hang, but they will not sit flush, and the picker will feel it as inconsistent reach. When you commission a Koala face, put a straight edge or a string line across the panel before loading, and check the rail fixings again after the first month. Visipro rack protectors on the aisle-side uprights are the sensible companion here, because most panel misalignment on Indian warehouse floors traces back to a single trolley or pallet truck strike, not to gradual wear.
Nesting for Transport: The Empty-Bin Problem Nobody Costs In
Koala Pick Bins nest. This sounds like a minor convenience until you look at the freight and storage arithmetic on any reasonable quantity. A picking face rebuild for a mid-sized distribution centre can involve several thousand bins, and the difference between bins that nest and bins that only stack square is the difference between a fraction of a truck and a full one. For a buyer in Coimbatore or Rajkot ordering into a plant several hundred kilometres from the stockist, that is a real line in the landed cost, and it is worth asking the question at quotation stage rather than discovering it when the vehicle arrives.
Nesting matters again after commissioning, in ways that recur monthly. Picking faces breathe: a seasonal SKU comes in, twenty bins come off the panel and go into store; the SKU goes out, they come back. If the empty bins occupy the same footprint as the full ones, that buffer stock takes rack space you would rather sell. Nested AKP bins go back into a compact column and can be kept on a low shelf or a trolley without becoming an obstruction. It is also the reason a stores team is more likely to actually strip a dead SKU off the face instead of leaving a half-empty bin in place for a year, which is the most common cause of picking-face rot.
The third place nesting earns its keep is in return flows between plants. Companies running a central store in Navi Mumbai or Pune with satellite units elsewhere in Maharashtra often move kitted parts in bins and want the empties back. A nesting bin comes back at a fraction of the outbound cube. This works well with the wider ALKON family too: Tote Bins such as the AK-421, at 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside and 365 x 230 x 90 mm inside, act as the transport layer while the AKP bins act as the presentation layer at the destination, and both travel back in far less space than they went out.
One caution: nesting and stacking are different behaviours and you should be clear which one you are relying on. A bin that nests deeply to save transport space usually does not also stack rigidly on the floor when full, because the same geometry that lets an empty drop inside another prevents a full one from sitting solidly on top. Koala bins are pick bins, meant to hang or sit on a shelf, not to be built into free-standing columns in a bulk store. If you need a bin that stacks full and holds its shape as a floor-stacked column, look at the Supra or Bull ranges instead; the four-way comparison of Supra, Hippo, Bull and Rhino Tuff bins goes through those trade-offs in detail.
Which AKP Codes Suit Roll-Post Shelving, and Which Do Not
Roll-post or slotted-angle shelving is still the default in a large share of Indian stores, from a machine shop in Peenya, Bengaluru to a spares godown in Howrah. It is cheap, it is adjustable in fine vertical increments, and it is already standing in the building. The question buyers ask us most often is which AKP codes work on it. The honest framing is that roll-post shelving does not hang bins, it supports them on a deck, so on roll-post you are using the Koala bin as a shelf bin and the rear lip is doing nothing. That is a legitimate use, but it changes which sizes make sense.
On a shelf, the constraint is the shelf's clear depth and the vertical pitch between decks. The rule is simple: the bin's outside depth must be less than the usable shelf depth, and the bin's outside height plus the hand clearance a picker needs must be less than the vertical pitch. Hand clearance is the number people forget. An AKP-01 is 60 mm high outside, but you do not set the shelf pitch at 65 mm, because then the picker cannot get a hand over the front lip and into the bin. Allow a meaningful clearance above the bin front, typically at least half the bin height again for a hand-pick operation, and more if the picker is wearing gloves, which is normal in foundry, forging and chemical environments.
The second roll-post consideration is depth utilisation. Standard slotted-angle shelving in India is commonly built at depths that are a poor multiple of small bin footprints, which leaves either dead space at the back or a partly overhanging bin at the front. Neither is acceptable on a picking face: dead space is paid-for volume doing nothing, and an overhanging bin will be knocked. The two clean answers are to run smaller AKP bins two deep with the rear bin as a replenishment reserve, so a picker empties the front bin and pulls the rear one forward, or to fit a rail or louvre panel to the front of the shelf and hang the bins clear of the deck entirely, which is where the full-length lip comes back into play.
Third, be realistic about shelf sag and edge condition. Roll-post decks in older stores are often chipboard or thin steel that has taken years of load, and their front edges are rarely straight. A hanging bin does not care, but a shelf bin sitting on a bowed deck will tilt back, and a tilted pick bin makes the picker reach further and see less. If your existing shelving is in that condition, moving to Koala shelving units (ASU 121 to ASU 144) or fitting rails to the existing frame is usually a better investment than buying more bins to sit on decks that are already past their useful life.
Koala Shelving Units ASU 121-144: Buying the Face as a System
The Koala shelving units, coded ASU 121 through ASU 144, exist so that you can buy a picking face as a designed system instead of assembling one from whatever shelving is available. The point of a matched unit is that the bin pitch, the shelf or rail pitch and the reach geometry have been worked out together. When you specify an ASU unit with AKP bins, you are not guessing at how many bins fit per level or whether the vertical clearance leaves room for a hand; the unit is built around the bin. For a stores manager who has spent an afternoon with a tape measure trying to make a bin range fit an existing rack, that is the whole value proposition.
The ASU numbering runs across a range of configurations, and the practical way to specify is to work backwards from your SKU count and pick rate rather than forwards from a catalogue code. Start by counting how many distinct part numbers must be presented at the face. Then decide how many of those need a full bin and how many can share a partitioned bin. Then decide the height band: everything a picker touches frequently should sit between roughly knee and shoulder height, with the fastest movers in the golden zone at waist to chest. Only then look at which ASU configuration gives you that number of bin positions within that height band. The article on cutting picking time through warehouse bin layout goes deeper into zoning by velocity, and it pairs directly with this specification exercise.
A matched Koala shelving unit also fixes a problem that plagues improvised faces: consistency between bays. When each bay is built by a different person from different offcuts of shelving, the bin heights differ by twenty or thirty millimetres from bay to bay. Individually that is invisible; across a forty-metre pick run it means the picker's hand never learns a fixed height and every pick becomes a small conscious act instead of a reflex. Standard units in standard configurations remove that variance. This is the same reason ALKON offers Panda Shelving Units (ASU) and Panda Pigeon Hole (APH) units for the Panda range, and the reason we generally advise against mixing three shelving systems in one picking aisle.
On procurement, treat the shelving unit and the bins as one order with one lead-time conversation, not two. A common and avoidable failure is bins arriving in Chennai in week one and the units in week five, so the bins sit in a corner in their nested columns and the project loses momentum. Because Shreeram Metafusion has stocked the ALKON range from Vashi for over thirty years, the sensible step is to send the full bill of materials, bin codes, unit codes, partition quantities and accessories, in one enquiry to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com or on 93266 29967, and get availability confirmed across the whole list before releasing the order.
Partitions: Getting More SKUs Onto the Face Without More Bins
Partitions are the least glamorous accessory in the ALKON range and often the highest-return one. A picking face is constrained by bin positions, not by volume, because most small parts do not come close to filling a bin before the SKU count runs out of space. Partitioning a bin into two or three compartments converts spare volume into extra SKU positions at effectively zero additional footprint. On a face holding a few hundred small electronic or hardware items, this is frequently the difference between one bay and two.
There are rules for doing it well. First, only partition parts that are visually distinct. If two variants differ by a fraction of a millimetre or by a marking you can only read with a magnifier, putting them in adjacent compartments of the same bin is asking for a picking error; the physical separation between two bins is itself an error control, and you should not give it away cheaply. Second, respect the arithmetic. An AKP-01 has 105 x 90 x 55 mm inside; split it once across the width and each compartment loses the partition thickness plus a little clearance, so you are working with something under 45 mm of width per side. Check that the part still drops in and that a hand or a scoop can still get it out.
Third, think about how the partition is retained. A partition that can lift out is flexible but will eventually be left out, or reinstalled in the wrong slot, and then two part numbers mix. If your operation cannot tolerate that risk, either avoid partitioning that particular bin or make the partition position part of the audit; a monthly walk of the face checking that every partition is present and in its labelled slot takes a few minutes and catches drift early. Partitions are available across the ALKON accessory range alongside louvre panels, stands, trolleys, rails, universal rail and crash carts.
Finally, use partitions to solve the slow-mover problem rather than to squeeze fast movers. A fast-moving part should own a whole bin, because it is replenished often and touched constantly, and anything that slows the pick or the top-up costs you every day. Slow movers, spares, service items, low-volume variants, are exactly what partitions are for: they consume a bin position out of proportion to their activity, and halving or thirding that consumption is pure gain. A quick review of your last twelve months of issue data will usually show that a substantial share of the face is slow movers, and that is where to start.
Why an Order-Picking Face Is Specified Differently From a Machine-Side Bin
This is the core of the matter and the reason a Koala bin is not simply a small Supra. An order-picking face is designed around a human reading a list and moving along a run, taking one or a few pieces from many different bins. A machine-side bin is designed around a fixed operator position, one or two part numbers, high touch frequency at a single location, and replenishment by a material handler on a route. Those two situations pull the specification in opposite directions on almost every parameter, and using one bin philosophy for the other job is the commonest reason a storage project disappoints.
On the picking face, breadth beats depth. You want many small bins, a shallow reach, a consistent front-lip height so the picker's hand learns one motion, and clear label position on every bin. Bin capacity should be set so that replenishment happens on a predictable cycle, not so that the bin never runs out; an oversized pick bin wastes the most expensive real estate in the building. This is precisely the AKP-01 case: 130 mm deep, 105 mm across the face, 60 mm high, small enough that a full aisle of them presents a large number of SKUs within one arm's sweep. At the machine side the priorities invert. You want fewer, larger bins, enough capacity to cover a shift or a batch without the operator waiting, and robustness against contact with the machine, the trolley and the operator's tooling.
Environment differs too. Machine-side bins live with cutting oil, swarf, coolant mist and occasional impact, so wall thickness, wash-down and impact tolerance matter more than presentation geometry. The picking face is usually a cleaner environment where the dominant wear is the picker's own hand, thousands of contacts a day on the front lip. Both are served by the same PP copolymer with its minus ten to plus seventy service range, but the shape you choose within that material is different. In an electronics plant near Hosur or Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, or a formulation unit around Ahmedabad or Hyderabad, add the ESD requirement to the picking side: ALKON offers ESD and conductive safe products, and specifying them at the face while running standard bins elsewhere is a normal and correct split.
There is a governance point as well. Machine-side bins usually belong to production and are managed by the line; picking bins belong to stores and are managed by the stores team. When the two use the same bin code, they end up competing for the same stock and borrowing from each other, and the picking face slowly loses bins to the shop floor. Deliberately choosing a distinct family for the picking face, Koala AKP on rails and ASU units, versus Supra or Bull for the machine side, makes the boundary visible. It is a low-effort control that survives staff changes, which most procedural controls do not.
Designing the Face: A Worked Example From SKU Count to Bill of Materials
Consider a realistic case: a spares and sub-assembly store serving a packaging machinery builder in Nashik, holding 420 small part numbers that are picked to works orders, plus about 60 larger items that will stay on pallet racking and are out of scope here. The team currently uses mixed cartons on slotted-angle shelving, picking takes too long, and stock accuracy is poor because parts migrate between cartons. The aim is a Koala face that presents all 420 within a compact aisle.
Step one is velocity classification. Pull twelve months of issue lines and sort part numbers by number of picks, not by value. Typically you will find that a modest fraction of the part numbers account for the large majority of picks. Those fast movers get their own bins in the golden zone. The middle band gets its own bins at reachable heights above and below. The slow tail, often more than half the part numbers, is the partition candidate pool. If 180 of the 420 can be paired two to a bin, your 420 SKUs need roughly 330 bin positions rather than 420, which may well be the difference between three bays and four.
Step two is bin sizing by part envelope. Measure the largest part in each family in its worst orientation and check it against the internal dimensions, keeping the longest part dimension to about 80 per cent of internal length. For a store like this, a large share will sit comfortably in AKP-01 at 105 x 90 x 55 mm inside, a group of longer items will need a longer AKP code, and a handful of awkward items should be pushed out of the pick face altogether onto a shelf or into a Tote Bin such as the AK-421 with its 365 x 230 x 90 mm interior. Resist the temptation to size the whole face for the largest exception; one oversized bin family drags the pitch of the entire unit.
Step three is the physical build and the bill of materials. Decide between hanging on louvre panels or universal rail and sitting on ASU 121-144 shelving; in most rebuilds the answer is both, with hanging used where the SKU set changes often and shelving where it is stable. Then write the BOM as one document: bin codes and quantities by size, partitions by quantity, louvre panels or rail lengths, ASU unit codes, stands or trolleys if the face includes a mobile element, crash carts if picks are consolidated to a cart as the picker walks, and Visipro rack protectors at every aisle end and every upright within a truck's turning circle. Send that as one enquiry rather than three, and confirm availability across the whole list before you plan the changeover weekend.
Labelling, Reach Heights and the Small Ergonomics That Decide Pick Rate
A bin range only delivers if the picker can find the bin without thinking. Label position should be identical on every bin in the aisle, and on Koala bins the natural position is the front face below the lip, where it is visible from a normal standing posture without bending. Fix the convention on day one and enforce it, because a face where labels sit at three different heights forces a visual search on every pick. If you are running barcode or voice confirmation, the label must also be scannable at the angle the picker naturally holds the scanner, which for a low shelf usually means angling the label rather than the picker's wrist.
Reach heights deserve a hard rule rather than a preference. Nothing that is picked more than occasionally should sit below roughly mid-thigh or above shoulder height, because both extremes cost time and, over a shift, cause fatigue that shows up as errors in the last hour. The workable band is narrower than most layouts assume, which is exactly why partitioning slow movers matters: it frees positions in the good band. When you use an ASU unit, put the fastest movers in the middle levels, the medium band immediately above and below, and reserve the top and bottom levels for slow movers, packaging or empty-bin buffer.
Consistency of the front-lip height across the face is a second-order detail with first-order effects. When every bin on a level presents its opening at the same height and the same distance from the aisle, the picker's arm follows one repeated path and the motion becomes automatic. Mix two bin heights on the same level and the hand has to re-aim every time. If you must mix sizes, mix them by level, not within a level, so that each horizontal run is uniform. This is one of the quiet advantages of buying a matched Koala shelving unit rather than assembling a face from whatever is standing.
Lighting and colour are worth a line each. A deep bin under poor overhead lighting is a dark hole and the picker will tip it out to see the contents, which is how mixed stock happens. Check illumination at the actual bin opening, not at the aisle floor, particularly on the lowest level where the shelf above shadows everything. On colour, resist the urge to code every part family; a face with eight bin colours becomes visual noise. Two or three colours used for a single meaningful distinction, for example quarantine or customer-owned stock, carry far more information than a rainbow does.
Failure Modes on Live Picking Faces, and How to Design Them Out
The first failure mode is the overfilled bin. A bin filled to the brim cannot be picked from cleanly; the picker's hand pushes parts over the front lip, they land on the floor or in the bin below, and now two part numbers are mixed. This is not a bin defect, it is a replenishment rule defect. Set a fill line, physically or by convention, at roughly two-thirds of internal height, and make the replenishment quantity respect it. If a part genuinely needs more than that, it needs a bigger bin or a second position, not a fuller one.
The second is silent migration. Over a year, parts move between bins because someone was in a hurry, a partition was left out, or a return was put away by eye rather than by label. The symptom is a physical count that matches at total level but not by location. The design answer is to make locations unambiguous: one label per bin, one bin per part number unless deliberately partitioned, and a documented partition map. The operational answer is a rolling cycle count of the face by location. Because Koala bins lift off a rail easily, counting a section of face is quick, which is an underrated advantage of a hanging system over one where you must reach into a fixed shelf.
The third is mechanical: bins that have been pulled off, dropped and put back badly, or rails and louvre panels that have drifted out of alignment. PP copolymer is tough and the material's service range means normal warehouse temperature swings across Indian summers and coastal humidity in Mumbai, Chennai or Kolkata are not a factor, but geometry is. Add a short monthly walk to the stores routine: run a hand along each rail to feel for bins that are not seated, check that no bin front is cracked at the lip, verify partitions are present, and confirm that panels are still flush. Ten minutes per bay per month prevents the slow decay that otherwise forces a rebuild.
The fourth is scope creep at the face. A picking face that starts with 300 well-chosen SKUs ends up with 380 because new parts were added and nothing was ever removed. The face gets crowded, bins get shared informally, and the discipline collapses. Build a removal rule at commissioning: any part number with no picks in a defined period comes off the face and goes to reserve, and the freed bin position is reallocated. Because the AKP bins nest, the bins that come off store compactly, which removes the usual excuse for leaving dead stock on the face.
Material, Marks and What the PP Specification Means in Practice
All ALKON bin ranges, Koala included, are moulded in polypropylene copolymer carrying resin code 05, with food-safe and recyclable marks and a stated service range of minus ten to plus seventy degrees Celsius. It is worth translating each of those into a purchasing decision rather than treating them as catalogue boilerplate. Polypropylene copolymer, as against homopolymer, is the grade chosen where impact resistance at lower temperatures matters; on a picking face the relevant impacts are a dropped bin and a knock from a trolley, both of which happen.
The service range is the number to check against your actual environment, and the honest reading is that most Indian industrial storage sits comfortably inside it. A steel-roofed godown in Ahmedabad or Rajkot in peak summer, an unconditioned mezzanine in Coimbatore, a coastal warehouse in Navi Mumbai with high humidity: all well within plus seventy. At the other end, a chilled ante-room or a cold-chain staging area in a pharma or food operation sits above minus ten in almost all cases. Where you must be careful is process-adjacent placement: a bin sitting next to an oven exit, a curing chamber or a hot forging line can see local air temperatures far above the ambient the plant reports, and that is a placement decision, not a bin decision.
The food-safe and recyclable marks matter to two groups of buyers. For food, nutraceutical and packaging-component handling, the mark is part of the evidence pack a quality team will ask for when a bin touches product-contact components. For everyone else, the recyclable mark and resin code 05 matter at end of life, and increasingly in customer and group sustainability reporting: a single-material PP bin with a clear resin code can be routed to a known recycling stream, unlike a bin with mixed materials or bonded metal parts. Note the boundary carefully: the marks describe the material, and nothing on this page should be read as a certification claim beyond what ALKON states for its ranges.
Chemical exposure is the area where buyers most often need to think rather than assume. Polypropylene handles a wide range of common industrial contacts, but the practical questions on a picking face are usually about incidental exposure, oily parts, residues on returned components, cleaning agents used on the face itself. The sensible procedure is to use the mildest cleaning regime that works, avoid aggressive solvents on a wipe-down schedule, and if a specific chemical is a known part of your process, raise it at enquiry stage so the right range within the ALKON catalogue is chosen. For ESD-sensitive electronics, the separate ESD and conductive safe products in the range are the correct answer rather than treating a standard bin as adequate.
Accessories That Make or Break a Koala Installation
The ALKON accessory list, partitions, louvre panels, stands, trolleys, rails, universal rail and crash carts, is not a set of optional extras so much as the parts that determine what kind of face you are actually building. Louvre panels give you a continuously adjustable vertical wall of bins; they are the right choice for a face that changes, for wall-mounted secondary faces beside a workbench, and for the ends of aisles where a full shelving unit will not fit. Rails and universal rail let you convert existing racking or shelving into a hanging face without replacing the structure, which is often the fastest and cheapest route in an operating warehouse that cannot be shut down for a rebuild.
Stands and trolleys change the geography of the pick. A double-sided stand loaded with Koala bins can be positioned exactly where a kitting or sub-assembly operation happens, so the parts come to the work rather than the worker walking to the store. Trolleys extend the same idea to a mobile face that follows a job. Crash carts are the consolidation half of the equation: the picker walks the face, takes from the bins and builds the order on the cart. If you are designing a face without deciding how picked stock leaves it, you have designed half a system, and the usual symptom is pickers carrying loose parts in their hands or in a cardboard box balanced on one arm.
Rack protection belongs on the accessory list even though it holds no parts. Visipro rack protectors on aisle-end uprights and on any upright within reach of a pallet truck or forklift turning circle prevent the single event that most often wrecks a picking face: a strike that puts a frame out of true and takes an entire bay of hanging bins with it. In Indian warehouses where aisle widths are frequently tighter than the equipment ideally needs, particularly in older buildings in Bhiwandi, Howrah or the industrial belts around Delhi NCR, this is not an optional refinement.
When you write the accessory quantities, count them properly rather than adding a round figure. Partitions should be counted from your actual slow-mover list. Rail lengths should be measured against the bay widths you have, not the ones on the original drawing. Panel quantities should account for the fact that you will want a little spare capacity on the face for growth, typically some free positions per bay rather than a fully packed wall on day one. A face with no spare positions forces the first new SKU into a shared bin, and that is how the discipline starts to slip.
Buying Alkon Koala Pick Bins in India: Supply, Lead Time and Standardisation
Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. supplies the ALKON range from Shop-1, Gagangiri Chs, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai 400703, open Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 19:00, on 93266 29967 or 98201 01937 and at enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com. Being an authorised stockist for over thirty years matters for a specific practical reason: continuity of codes. A picking face is a long-lived asset, and the value of standardising on AKP bins is only realised if you can buy the same code in three years when you extend the aisle. Buying bins from whichever supplier is cheapest on a given day is how a store ends up with four incompatible bin families and no interchangeable spares.
Navi Mumbai is a workable base for supply across the western belt and beyond. Deliveries into Pune, Nashik and the rest of Maharashtra are straightforward; Gujarat customers in Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat and Rajkot are on established routes; and the southern clusters around Bengaluru, Chennai, Coimbatore and Hyderabad, along with Delhi NCR and Kolkata, are regular destinations for the range. The nesting characteristic of the AKP bins helps here again: a large bin order from Navi Mumbai to Coimbatore ships in far less cube than the same quantity of non-nesting bins, and that shows up directly in the freight component of your landed cost.
On enquiry practice, the single most useful thing a buyer can do is send dimensions and quantities rather than a description. Instead of asking for small pick bins, state the AKP codes if you know them, or state the internal dimensions you need, the number of bins, whether they will hang on rail or louvre panel or sit on shelving, whether you also need ASU 121-144 units, how many partitions, and the delivery location. That single message usually eliminates two rounds of correspondence, and with a catalogue of 476-plus products across nine ranges it is what allows a stockist to point you at the right family instead of the nearest one.
For multi-site groups, take the standardisation decision centrally and once. Agree the bin codes, the shelving configuration and the labelling convention as a group standard, then let each plant order against it. The benefit is not just purchasing leverage; it is that a stores person transferring from your Pune plant to your Hyderabad plant already knows the system, spare bins are interchangeable between sites, and a layout that worked in one facility can be copied rather than redesigned. If you are building the wider picture across store types, the warehouse storage bins overview and the industrial storage bins hub set out how the ranges relate to each other across an entire facility.
Commissioning Checklist and the First Ninety Days
Commissioning a Koala face is worth treating as a small project with a defined handover, because the habits set in the first weeks are the ones that persist. Before loading a single part, confirm the physical build: panels and rails flush and level, ASU units square and stable, bins seated fully on their lips along the whole run, and rack protectors fitted at every exposed upright. Then confirm the information layer: every bin labelled at the same position, every location recorded in the system, and the partition map documented where partitions are used.
The load-in itself should follow the velocity plan, not convenience. It is tempting to fill the face in part-number order because that is how the old cartons were arranged, and it is a mistake that will cost you every day afterwards. Load the fast movers into the golden zone first, then work outwards. Where you are moving from an existing store, do the transfer bin by bin with a count at the point of transfer, so the changeover doubles as a full physical verification. Plan it for a weekend or a low-activity window and staff it properly; a half-finished migration that runs into a working Monday produces exactly the mixed-stock problems the project was meant to eliminate.
Set the review at thirty days and again at ninety. At thirty days, walk the face with the pickers and ask a narrow question: which bins are you reaching past, tipping out, or refilling too often? Those three symptoms map to wrong position, insufficient lighting or excessive depth, and undersized bin respectively, and all three are cheap to fix in the first month. At ninety days, pull the issue data again and check whether your velocity classification still holds; if a part has moved from the slow tail to a fast mover, it should move into the golden zone and get its own bin.
Finally, write the rules down in half a page and put them where the stores team can see them: fill to the line, one part number per compartment, label position fixed, dead SKUs off the face on a defined rule, monthly mechanical walk, quarterly velocity review. A picking face does not degrade because the bins fail; PP copolymer bins on a properly fixed rail will outlast several rounds of process change. It degrades because the rules that made the layout coherent are never written down and quietly disappear with the person who set them up. The bins are the easy part of the purchase; the discipline is what turns them into a faster pick.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Alkon Koala Pick Bins and ordinary open-front storage bins?
The defining difference is the full-length rear lip that runs the entire width of the Koala bin's back face, which lets the bin hang on louvre panels, rails and universal rail rather than only sitting on a shelf. That continuous engagement spreads the hanging load across the whole rear face instead of concentrating it at two hook points, so the bin stays square under dense loads and can be slid sideways to close gaps when a part number is deleted from the range. Koala bins also nest for transport and empty storage, which matters when you are shipping thousands of bins across the country or buffering bins that come off the face seasonally. Ordinary open-front bins such as the Supra range are built to stack and store rather than to hang and present, so they are the right choice for machine-side and bulk-store duty and the wrong choice for a changeable picking face.
What are the dimensions of the Koala AKP-01 pick bin?
The AKP-01 measures 130 x 105 x 60 mm on the outside and 105 x 90 x 55 mm on the inside. Read both numbers when you plan, because they answer different questions. The outside 130 mm is the depth that goes into the rack or shelf and decides how many bins fit front to back; the outside 105 mm is the width across the picking face and decides how many bins fit along a rail; the 60 mm outside height plus your hand clearance decides the vertical pitch between levels. The inside dimensions decide whether your part actually fits and how much you can hold, and the practical fill height on a hand-pick bin is roughly two-thirds of the 55 mm internal height rather than the full figure, because the picker needs clearance to get a hand in and out cleanly. The 25 mm difference between outside and inside length is not wasted material; it is the front lip, the rear hanging lip and the wall section that survives daily handling.
Can Koala Pick Bins be used on existing roll-post or slotted-angle shelving?
Yes, but understand what you are doing. Roll-post shelving supports bins on a deck rather than hanging them, so the full-length rear lip contributes nothing and you are using the Koala bin as a shelf bin. That is a legitimate arrangement and it works, provided the bin's outside depth is less than the usable shelf depth and the vertical pitch leaves genuine hand clearance above the bin front, typically at least half the bin height again, and more where pickers wear gloves. The two problems that usually surface are depth mismatch, where standard shelf depths leave dead space behind the bins or leave bins overhanging the front edge, and shelf condition, where older decks have bowed and tilt the bins backwards so the picker reaches further and sees less. The clean fixes are to run bins two deep with the rear one as a replenishment reserve, or to fit rails or louvre panels to the front of the existing frame and hang the bins clear of the deck entirely.
How do Koala shelving units ASU 121 to ASU 144 differ from buying bins and shelving separately?
A matched Koala shelving unit is designed around the bin, so the bin pitch, the shelf or rail pitch and the reach geometry have already been worked out together. When you assemble a face from whatever shelving is standing in the building, you end up guessing at how many bins fit per level and whether the vertical clearance leaves room for a hand, and you also introduce variation between bays: each bay built by a different person from different materials presents bins at slightly different heights. Across a long pick run that variation stops the picker's arm from learning one repeated motion and turns every pick into a small conscious act. The right way to specify an ASU unit is to work backwards from your SKU count and velocity data, deciding how many bin positions you need within the good reach band between roughly mid-thigh and shoulder height, and then choosing the configuration that delivers those positions, rather than starting from a catalogue code and fitting your parts to it.
Should I partition Koala pick bins, and how do I decide which ones?
Partition the slow movers, not the fast movers. A picking face is constrained by bin positions rather than by volume, because most small parts run out of distinct SKUs long before they run out of space, so partitioning converts spare volume into extra SKU positions at effectively no additional footprint. Slow movers such as service items, spares and low-volume variants consume a bin position out of all proportion to their activity and are exactly the right candidates. Fast movers should own a whole bin, because anything that slows the pick or the top-up on a high-activity part costs you every single day. Two rules keep partitioning safe: only partition parts that are visually distinct, since the physical gap between two separate bins is itself an error control you should not give away for similar-looking variants, and check the arithmetic, because splitting an AKP-01 across its 90 mm internal width leaves under 45 mm per compartment once the partition thickness and clearance are accounted for.
Why is a bin for an order-picking face specified differently from a bin at the machine side?
They are solving opposite problems. An order-picking face serves a person walking a run and taking a few pieces from many different bins, so it rewards breadth over depth: many small bins, a shallow reach, a consistent front-lip height so the hand learns one motion, and a bin capacity sized so that replenishment happens on a predictable cycle rather than so the bin never empties, since an oversized pick bin wastes the most valuable space in the building. A machine-side bin serves a fixed operator position handling one or two part numbers at high frequency, so it rewards capacity enough to cover a shift or a batch and robustness against oil, swarf, coolant mist and knocks from tooling and trolleys. There is also a governance benefit in deliberately using different families for the two roles: picking bins belong to stores, machine-side bins belong to production, and when both use the same code the picking face slowly loses its bins to the shop floor.
What does the polypropylene copolymer specification mean for Indian working conditions?
All ALKON bin ranges including Koala are moulded in polypropylene copolymer with resin code 05, carrying food-safe and recyclable marks, and with a service range of minus ten to plus seventy degrees Celsius. In practice almost every Indian industrial storage environment sits inside that band: a steel-roofed godown in Ahmedabad or Rajkot at the height of summer, an unconditioned mezzanine in Coimbatore, a humid coastal warehouse in Navi Mumbai, and at the cold end, a chilled ante-room in a pharma or food operation. The case that needs care is process-adjacent placement, where a bin standing beside an oven exit, a curing chamber or a hot forging line can see local air temperatures well above whatever ambient the plant reports; that is a placement decision rather than a bin limitation. The copolymer grade is chosen for impact resistance, which on a picking face means tolerance of the dropped bin and the trolley knock that will eventually happen.
How much does nesting actually save, and when does it matter most?
Nesting matters at three moments. The first is inbound freight: a picking-face rebuild can run to several thousand bins, and nested bins occupy a fraction of the cube of bins that only stack square, which shows up directly in the landed cost of an order shipped from Navi Mumbai to Coimbatore, Kolkata or Delhi NCR. The second is ongoing operations, because picking faces breathe as seasonal and superseded SKUs come off the face and come back later; if empty bins occupy the same footprint as full ones, that buffer eats rack space you would rather use, and stores teams quietly stop stripping dead SKUs off the face because storing the empties is a nuisance. The third is inter-plant return flows, where kitted parts move out in Tote Bins and both the totes and the presentation bins come back in far less space than they went out. One caution: nesting and rigid full-load stacking are different behaviours, and Koala bins are pick bins meant to hang or sit on a shelf rather than to be built into floor-stacked columns.
What information should I send when enquiring about Koala Pick Bins?
Send dimensions and quantities rather than a description, because with 476-plus products across nine ranges the difference between the nearest bin and the right bin is entirely in the numbers. State the AKP codes if you already know them, or state the internal dimensions your parts require and the number of pieces you want each bin to hold. Say whether the bins will hang on louvre panels or rails or sit on shelving, whether you also need Koala shelving units in the ASU 121 to ASU 144 range, how many partitions you want and for which bins, what accessories are in scope such as stands, trolleys, universal rail, crash carts or Visipro rack protectors, and the delivery location. Sending the whole bill of materials as one enquiry to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com or on 93266 29967 also lets availability be confirmed across the full list before you release the order, which avoids the common failure where bins arrive weeks before the shelving and the project stalls.
How do I stop a well-designed Koala picking face from degrading over time?
Faces rarely fail because the bins fail; polypropylene copolymer bins on a properly fixed rail outlast several rounds of process change. They fail because the rules that made the layout coherent are never written down and leave with the person who set them up. Write half a page of standing rules and post it at the face: fill only to about two-thirds of internal height so parts cannot be pushed over the front lip into the bin below, one part number per compartment with a documented partition map, one fixed label position on every bin, a defined rule for taking dead SKUs off the face and reallocating the position, a ten-minute monthly mechanical walk per bay to check that bins are seated, lips are uncracked, partitions are present and panels are still flush, and a quarterly review of issue data to re-rank velocity and move parts between zones. Also leave some free bin positions per bay at commissioning, because a fully packed face forces the first new part number into a shared bin and that is where the discipline begins to slip.
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