Industrial Storage Bins Manufacturer in India: Standardising Your Entire Bin Programme
Most Indian plants do not choose their storage bins. They accumulate them. A line expansion here, a local purchase there, a set of returnable crates that a vendor never asked back, and within a few years the stores department is running four incompatible bin families across the same racking. This page is the hub for doing it the other way round: picking one catalogue deep enough to cover the whole site, one authorised source to buy it from, and one written standard that stops the fleet drifting back into odd lots. Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. operates storagebins.in from Vashi, Navi Mumbai, and has been an authorised stockist of ALKON Plastics Pvt. Ltd. for over thirty years. ALKON describes itself as the "Manufacturer of The Largest Range of Material Handling Bins in India", and the catalogue behind this site carries 476+ products across nine ranges. What follows is how a purchase, stores or production manager turns that catalogue into a programme.
What a Bin Programme Is, and Why Plants Drift Into Odd Lots
A bin programme is the written answer to three questions asked of every stored part: which bin holds it, where does that bin sit, and what is its catalogue code. Most stores departments can answer the first two by walking the aisle and pointing. The third is where it falls apart, because the bin in front of you was bought four years ago from a trader who no longer picks up the phone, and nothing moulded into it tells you what to reorder. A programme replaces pointing with a table, and that table is the only thing that survives a stores officer changing jobs.
Odd lots never arrive through one bad decision. They arrive one reasonable decision at a time. A sub-assembly line has to be commissioned in three weeks, so the stores in-charge buys whatever the local market can supply that Saturday. A component vendor ships in returnable crates, the crates are convenient at the point of use, and they quietly stop going back. A cancelled project leaves forty unmarked bins behind and they get absorbed into the kitting area because scrapping them feels wasteful. Every one of those calls is defensible on the day it is made. The damage only shows up in aggregate.
The costs of that drift are quiet, which is exactly why they get tolerated for years. Mixed bins do not nest into each other, so empty-bin storage eats floor that was budgeted for material. They do not stack squarely, so once a month a leaning column of kitted parts goes over. Label areas differ across families, so printed labels come in four widths and half of them peel. Cycle counting slows because the counter loses the full-bin heuristic: a full bin no longer implies a known quantity. And each replacement becomes a small procurement project with a photograph on WhatsApp and a fortnight of waiting.
The alternative is not sophisticated and does not need a consultant. It needs one catalogue with enough depth that you are never forced off-standard, and one supplier who actually stocks that catalogue. Depth matters more than it first sounds. The moment a shallow range cannot hold a particular part, somebody buys something else, and once one part is off-standard the aisle follows within a quarter. With 476+ products across nine ranges, the working assumption is that a size exists for the part; the job is to find it and write it down rather than improvise on a Saturday afternoon.
The Nine Ranges, and the Job Each One Actually Does
Reading a bin catalogue as a flat list of several hundred items is the fastest way to abandon the exercise. Read it as nine ranges instead, each answering a different question about how material behaves. The material handling families cover everything picked, carried or fed to a machine: Supra Bins (SB 1 through SB 8, plus SB 7X), Hippo Bins (612/T, S, S2, M, DW and B), Bull Bins (5 to 55), Rhino Tuff Bins in the ARTB series, Tote Bins AK-421 and AK-422, and Mammoth Bins in mesh and solid. They sit together under /products/fpo-material-handling-bins-and-accessories.
A second group is defined by the structure the bin lives in rather than by the part inside it. Panda Shelf Bins run from PSB 301 up to 606, with transparent "T" versions of the same footprints, supported by Panda Shelving Units in the ASU series and the Panda Pigeon Hole (APH) at /products/panda-shelving-systems-and-accessories. Koala Pick Bins in the AKP series, with matching Koala shelving, sit at /products/koala-pick-bins. Roo Tilt Bins, including RTBW wall units, hinge out from a panel at /products/roo-tilt-bins. ACO Component Organisers at /products/components-organisers put very small items into drawers instead of open fronts.
Two ranges are not about holding parts at all. ESD and conductive safe products exist so a plastic bin does not become the weakest link in an electronics cell; Visipro rack protectors exist to stop a pallet truck writing off an upright. Both live in the same catalogue for a reason — bought separately they get deferred to the next budget year. A useful habit when mapping your own plant is to name the range before any dimension: walk the floor and mark each location as bench pick face, shelf front, drawer, WIP buffer, ESD cell or bulk, and open the size tables only afterwards.
Reading the Material Spec Before You Read the Size Chart
Every bin range in this catalogue is moulded in polypropylene copolymer, carries resin identification code 05, is rated for a service range of -10°C to +70°C, and carries food-safe and recyclable marks. Those four facts settle more internal arguments than any dimension ever will, and they belong in your own standard document verbatim. A single material across the whole fleet also means one cleaning method, one storage rule, one disposal route and one answer when a safety officer or customer auditor asks what the bins are made of. Mixed-material fleets force that answer to be researched separately for every family you own.
The temperature range needs translating into your actual site before it is useful. Minus ten degrees covers cold rooms and chilled storage without special provision. Seventy degrees is comfortable for ambient conditions anywhere in India, including a shed roof in Ahmedabad in May, but it is a limit on surface temperature and not only on air temperature. That distinction matters near heat treatment lines, curing ovens, paint booths, and any bin parked in direct afternoon sun against a west-facing shutter. If a bin will sit within radiant range of hot equipment, measure the surface temperature at that spot across one shift before committing the location.
The food-safe and recyclable marks earn their keep in specific places: food processing and pharmaceutical packing halls routinely need to state what a container in the hall is made of, and the resin 05 code lets a recycler identify the polymer at end of life without testing it. What the specification does not do is answer every chemical exposure question. If bins will hold parts wet with cutting oil, come straight out of a degreasing process, or sit in a plating shop atmosphere, put one bin in that exact spot for two to four weeks and inspect it for softening, crazing or discolouration before you order three hundred.
Building the Size Ladder: Outside, Inside, and the Gap Between
The most common sizing mistake is reading one number where two exist. A Supra SB 1 measures 125 x 100 x 60 mm outside and 117 x 80 x 52 mm inside. That is 20 mm lost across the width and 8 mm on both length and depth, and the loss is not tolerance; it is wall thickness plus the taper that lets bins nest when empty. Parts must be planned against inside figures. Shelf pitch, louvre spacing, drawer clearance and trolley decks must be planned against outside figures. Confusing the two is how a shelf ends up 4 mm short across a run of twelve bins.
Once that habit is in place, a ladder of known sizes becomes the backbone of the programme. The aim is not to catalogue everything available; it is to pick six to ten sizes that step up sensibly and cover the large majority of what your plant holds, leaving genuine extremes to be handled deliberately. Choose them so adjacent steps are distinguishable across an aisle, because two bins that look nearly identical will be confused by an operator in a hurry, and a confused bin is an inventory error that nobody logs. The dimensions below are real catalogue figures and are safe to plan against:
A bin sized so the intended quantity fills it to the brim is sized wrong. Aim for roughly two-thirds in normal running: that leaves headroom for a delayed replenishment, keeps parts from spilling into neighbours, and lets an operator read the level from standing height without pulling the bin out. Weight is the second constraint and it is easy to underestimate — the 145 x 86 x 66 mm interior of a Bull Bin 5 filled with steel washers is a genuinely heavy object to lift off a shoulder-height shelf twenty times a shift. Size the bin to the lift, not only to the part.
When a part falls between two sizes, default to the smaller one and increase replenishment frequency instead. A smaller bin holds less, but it keeps the pick face compact, keeps the walk short and makes shortages visible earlier. The exception is any part whose absence stops a line, where one stoppage outweighs a year of extra floor space; write that exception into the standard explicitly so it is a rule rather than a favour granted case by case. The trade-offs behind all of this are worked through further in the guide on how to choose the right storage bin size.
- Supra SB 1 — 125 x 100 x 60 mm outside, 117 x 80 x 52 mm inside: fasteners, O-rings, terminals, small mouldings at the bench.
- Hippo 612/T — 100 x 110 x 53 mm outside, 80 x 90 x 43 mm inside: the narrowest front here, so the most bins per running metre of louvre panel.
- Rhino ARTB-05 — 109 x 104 x 49 mm outside, 95 x 89 x 43 mm inside: a small bin for areas where handling is rough.
- Bull Bin 5 — 168 x 102 x 74 mm outside, 145 x 86 x 66 mm inside: a clear step up in depth for heavier small parts.
- Panda Shelf Bin 301 — 315 x 100 x 60 mm outside, 293 x 86 x 55 mm inside: long and narrow, made to use the full depth of a shelf.
- Koala AKP-01 — 130 x 105 x 60 mm outside, 105 x 90 x 55 mm inside: open-front pick bin for a hand-reach pick face.
- Tote AK-421 — 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside, 365 x 230 x 90 mm inside: the unit that travels between stations.
- Mammoth — 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside, 740 x 250 x 290 mm inside: bulk quantities and long items, in mesh or solid.
- ACO 18 organiser cabinet — 457 (H) x 424 (W) x 164 (D) mm: drawer storage for the very small items at the bench.
Point of Use: Panda Shelf Bins, Koala Pick Bins, Roo Tilt Bins and ACO Organisers
Panda Shelf Bins are shaped by the shelf rather than by the part. The PSB 301 is 315 x 100 x 60 mm outside with 293 x 86 x 55 mm inside, and that long, narrow proportion is deliberate: it uses the full depth of a standard shelf while keeping many separate part numbers visible along the front edge. The range runs up to 606, so one shelf can carry three or four sizes from the same family with a consistent front face. Transparent "T" versions exist and are worth specifying wherever the level in the bin is itself the replenishment signal.
Koala Pick Bins in the AKP series are built for the hand rather than the shelf. The AKP-01 is 130 x 105 x 60 mm outside and 105 x 90 x 55 mm inside, with an open front that lets an operator reach in at an angle instead of over the lip. Where a pick face is worked continuously through a shift, that angle is the difference between a comfortable reach and a shoulder complaint by Friday. Koala shelving is available as the matched structure, and using it avoids packing pieces later, because bins and shelving designed together sit square without help.
Roo Tilt Bins solve a different problem: wall and panel space going unused while the floor is congested. RTB units and RTBW wall units hinge out so the container is the door, which suits loose small parts that are scooped rather than picked individually — clips, washers, cable ties, terminals. ACO Component Organisers take the opposite approach and put parts behind a drawer; the ACO 18 cabinet is 457 mm high, 424 mm wide and 164 mm deep. Drawers earn their place where dust or oil mist would settle into an open front, and the component organisers for small parts page covers the variants.
Handling and Movement: Hippo, Bull, Rhino, Tote and Mammoth
Hippo Bins are the family to reach for when the constraint is frontage rather than volume. The 612/T measures 100 x 110 x 53 mm outside with 80 x 90 x 43 mm inside, a narrow front for its depth, which gives the most separate part numbers per running metre of louvre panel or rail. The family extends through S, S2, M, DW and B, so a wall can carry several capacities without changing geometry and the visual line stays clean. That is not cosmetic: a ragged front face is where operators start stuffing loose parts into the gaps, and gaps are where inventory accuracy dies.
Bull Bins are the workhorse of the handling group, running from Bull Bin 5 up to Bull Bin 55. The Bull Bin 5 at 168 x 102 x 74 mm outside and 145 x 86 x 66 mm inside is already noticeably deeper than the small bench sizes, and the larger numbers carry the range up to volumes suited to WIP buffers and machine-side feeding. Because the sizes are one family they nest when empty and stack when full in a predictable way. Read the whole family before picking a size; buying only the middle of a range is a common and expensive habit.
Rhino Tuff Bins in the ARTB series answer a specific complaint rather than a general one. The ARTB-05 is 109 x 104 x 49 mm outside and 95 x 89 x 43 mm inside, so on paper it sits close to the small Supra and Hippo sizes. Its case is made where handling is genuinely rough: press shops, foundry-adjacent sub-stores, castings arriving with flash still on them, and anywhere a bin is regularly dropped rather than placed. If your breakage record shows the same two or three locations year after year, those locations are the argument for a tougher bin, not a plant-wide policy change.
The movement layer sits above all of this. Tote Bins AK-421 (400 x 255 x 100 mm outside, 365 x 230 x 90 mm inside) and AK-422 are the units that travel between stations, into a kitting trolley and back. Mammoth Bins at 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside and 740 x 250 x 290 mm inside, in mesh and solid versions, handle bulk quantities and long items; specify mesh where you want the contents visible or ventilation matters. Trolleys, stands and crash carts turn static containers into a route, and a good programme decides the route and the bin together.
The Structures That Hold Bins: Louvre Panels, Shelving, Rails and Trolleys
A bin with no fixed home ends up on the floor, and once one bin is on the floor the aisle marking argument is lost. Partitions, louvre panels, stands, trolleys, rails, the universal rail and crash carts are not add-ons to be ordered later; they are half the programme. The most common rollout failure is a plant that orders three hundred bins on one purchase order and the panels to hang them from six weeks later. In that gap the bins get used loose, operators invent their own arrangement, and the panels arrive to find the habit already set hard.
Louvre panels and rails decide how the pick face is built. Panels give a solid vertical surface that can be filled top to bottom and suit a wall or the back of a bench. Rails give a lighter mounting for the edge of a workbench, the side of a machine or a trolley frame, and the universal rail exists so that one mounting decision does not have to be remade at every location. Whichever you choose, order the panel or rail and its bins as a single line of thought, because bins-per-panel is a dimension exercise you only want to do once.
Panda Shelving Units in the ASU series and the Panda Pigeon Hole (APH) cover cases where the structure is the product: ASU units are built around the shelf bin footprints so nothing is wasted in depth, while the pigeon hole suits documents, small kits and returnable items needing a fixed slot each, which is why dispatch offices and quality hold areas use them heavily. Partitions divide the larger bins and are the cheapest way to add part numbers without adding bins, provided you keep the rule that a partitioned bin still carries one label per compartment.
ESD Areas and Rack Protection: The Two Ranges People Forget
In an electronics assembly cell an ordinary polypropylene bin is not a neutral object. Everything else on that line — wrist straps, mats, flooring, ionisers — has been specified and paid for to control static, and a standard bin sitting in the middle of it undoes part of that investment quietly, with no alarm and no visible defect until field failures start arriving months later. ESD and conductive safe products close that gap, and they belong in the same catalogue as everything else at /products/esd-safe-products so that specifying them is a normal step rather than an exception someone has to justify.
Governance around ESD bins matters as much as the bins. Keep them in a separate physical store location, give them their own block of codes in the part-to-bin table, and write one rule into the standard: no non-ESD bin crosses the boundary of a protected area for any reason, including a temporary one. Temporary is where this always breaks down. A standard Supra bin carried in for one urgent kit is still on that bench three months later, and by then nobody recalls it was an exception. Making the two fleets visually different is what allows anyone walking past to enforce the rule.
Visipro rack protectors sit at the other end of the risk scale and are usually last on the list, which is exactly the wrong place for them. A racking upright hit by a pallet truck at an aisle end is a structural problem, and repairing or replacing a bay — including clearing stock off it and taking it out of service — costs far more than the protection would have. Aisle ends, pick-face uprights on busy routes and the corners nearest a dock door are where the money is. Putting protection on the same requisition as the bins is the only reliable way to see it bought.
Buying a Programme Instead of a Purchase Order
It is worth being precise about who does what, because the search term and the commercial reality do not always line up. ALKON Plastics Pvt. Ltd. is the manufacturer, and describes its own position as the manufacturer of the largest range of material handling bins in India. Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd., trading as storagebins.in from Vashi, is an authorised stockist and has held that position for over thirty years. The page on the storage bins manufacturer in India goes into that relationship further, including why continuity of catalogue codes is the part a buyer actually feels.
An enquiry that arrives with the right information gets a useful answer on the first reply instead of the fourth, and that difference is usually a week of calendar time on a rollout already under pressure. The slow quotation is rarely the supplier's doing; it is the enquiry that says "need bins for small parts" and nothing more, which forces a round of questions before anyone can point at a code. Before writing to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com or calling 93266 29967 or 98201 01937, put the following together in one message:
Then sample before you commit. Order one of each shortlisted size, put them on the real line with real parts for two weeks, and let operators use them unsupervised. Two weeks is enough for the practical objections to surface: the lip sits wrong for that bench, the front opening is awkward for a gloved hand, the level cannot be seen from the aisle, the bin creeps forward on the rail when parts are pulled. Every one of those is a cheap discovery on six bins and an expensive one on six hundred, and no dimension sheet predicts them.
Once sizes are settled the commercial side becomes simple in a way that is easy to underrate. You order by catalogue code, the code means the same thing next year, and a plant in Coimbatore replacing a broken bin quotes the same code as the plant in Rajkot that specified it. Consolidate into fewer, larger releases rather than a trickle of small ones; it reduces freight per bin and keeps the standard visible in the purchasing system. Listings sit under /products, literature under /downloads, and the counter at Shop-1, Gagangiri CHS, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai 400703 is open Monday to Saturday, 10:00 to 19:00.
- Part dimensions and weight per piece, plus the quantity you intend to hold at each location.
- Internal dimensions available at the location: shelf clear height and depth, louvre panel size, drawer opening, trolley deck.
- How many separate part numbers must appear across one metre of pick face.
- The environment: ambient, cold room, wash-down area, oil mist, near heat, ESD-protected.
- Photographs of the existing bins and shelving, including anything the new fleet must fit into.
- Whether this is one location, one plant, or a multi-site standard you intend to repeat.
Rollout: One Aisle First, Then the Plant
A whole-plant cutover in a single weekend sounds decisive and behaves badly. The better shape is a pilot: take one aisle, cell or sub-store, do it completely, and let it run a month before anything else is ordered. Choose the pilot for how much it will teach you, not for how easy it looks. A busy pick face with mixed part sizes and at least one awkward part — long, oily, heavy or fragile — will expose problems that a tidy stationery store never will. A pilot chosen because it was certain to pass has told you nothing you can use later.
The sequence within the pilot matters. Count and record what is actually there first, including parts nobody has issued for a year, because a bin programme is also the best inventory clean-up you will get. Then map parts to sizes on paper and check the arithmetic across the shelf run using outside dimensions. Then label — labels go on before parts go in, not after. Then move material in one shift, leaving the old location empty and visible rather than immediately reused. Finally leave it alone for four weeks and see what operators changed without telling anyone; that is the audit that matters.
Decide the fate of displaced bins on day one, in writing, before the first new bin lands. Serviceable bins that match an existing standard go to a named reuse location. Broken or off-standard bins go to scrap the same day. Skip this and the old bins collect near the wall "for now", and within two months they are quietly back on the shop floor, which means you have paid for a new fleet and kept the old problem. Most failed standardisation efforts fail here rather than at the specification stage. A workable outline for a plant of moderate size looks like this:
- Weeks 1-2: floor walk, range mapping by category, photographs, count of existing storage locations.
- Weeks 3-4: sizing against inside dimensions, shelf and panel arithmetic against outside dimensions, shortlist of six to ten codes.
- Weeks 5-6: samples on the real line, operator feedback collected in writing, shortlist cut to the final standard.
- Weeks 7-10: pilot aisle ordered, labelled, cut over, and displaced bins dispositioned the same week.
- Weeks 11-14: pilot reviewed, standard document written and signed off, plant-wide quantities released in phases by area.
Governing the Standard So It Does Not Drift Back
The standard itself should be short enough that people read it. One page is enough: approved codes with outside and inside dimensions, approved accessories, the rule for which range goes where, the ESD boundary rule, and the name of the person who approves exceptions. Past two pages it becomes a document that is filed rather than followed. Print it and put it on the wall of the stores office and the purchase office. A standard that lives only in a shared folder is one that new joiners never see, and new joiners are the people most likely to buy off-standard in perfectly good faith.
Behind the one-pager sits the part-to-bin table, which is the real asset. Every stocked part number gets a bin code and a location, and the table has one named owner. It does not matter whether it lives in your ERP, a spreadsheet or the stores register, as long as changes to it are deliberate. The test of whether you actually have a programme is simple: pick any bin on the floor at random and ask what should be reordered if it cracks tomorrow. If the answer takes under thirty seconds and needs nobody's memory, the programme exists.
Change control is the piece most plants skip, and skipping it undoes everything else inside about eighteen months. Bins get bought on small-value requisitions that fall below approval limits, so the fleet fragments while every individual transaction looks correct in the system. Nobody ever approves a decision to abandon the standard; it erodes one requisition at a time, exactly the way the odd lots accumulated in the first place. New line commissioning is the other leak, and it needs the bin codes named during design review rather than during ramp-up. Two rules stop most of the damage:
Review the standard once a year against what the floor actually contains, and do the review by walking rather than by reading the register. A year of small deviations is easy to correct; five years of them is another standardisation project. The walk should also pick up the opposite problem — sizes on the approved list that nobody has ordered in two years, which usually means the ladder has one step too many and can be simplified. A standard that shrinks slightly at each annual review is healthier than one that only ever grows.
- Every storage bin requisition, whatever its value, routes through the person who owns the standard.
- Any code not on the approved list needs a written reason and a decision: permanent addition to the standard, or a one-time exception with an end date.
Maintenance, Damage and End of Life
Polypropylene bins need very little maintenance, but very little is not none, and the small routine is worth writing down. Wash with water and a mild detergent; avoid abrasive scouring, which dulls transparent bins and makes level-checking harder over time. Dry them properly before stacking — bins stacked wet in a humid coastal warehouse in Mumbai or Chennai hold moisture between the nested walls for days, and that moisture reaches the parts inside. Where the food-safe mark is part of your justification, set a cleaning frequency and record it, because an unrecorded routine is treated by auditors as no routine at all.
The failure modes are consistent and therefore designable-out. Cracks usually start at the front lip or the corner radius where a bin is repeatedly grabbed and pulled, not mid-wall. Overloading with dense material stresses the base and makes stacked columns unstable long before the bin splits. Bins stacked on an uneven or part-filled load will bow. A forklift or pallet truck strike is instant and total, which is the argument for rack protection at aisle ends. Prolonged direct sunlight in an open yard is the slowest failure mode and the easiest to avoid, by simply not storing bins in the yard.
End of life should be a decision, not a slow accumulation behind the store. Resin identification code 05 and the recyclable mark mean a scrap processor can identify the polymer without guessing, so segregate broken bins from mixed plastic scrap and they keep some value instead of none. Never burn them on site. Just as importantly, do not let cracked bins stay in service on the argument that they still hold parts — a bin that has visibly failed is the one that drops a full load of components onto a shop floor, and a scattered load costs more in recovery and rejection than the replacement.
A short inspection folded into the periodic stock count catches almost all of this before it becomes a spill. It needs no separate exercise and no separate form; the person already handling every bin to count it is the right person to look at the bin while it is in their hands. Give them five things to check, and a clear instruction that anything flagged comes out of service the same day rather than at month end. Damaged bins allowed to stay in service until a convenient moment are the ones that fail at an inconvenient one:
- Any crack, split or star mark at the lip, base or corner — remove from service immediately, do not "watch" it.
- Bowed or deformed bases from sustained overloading.
- Bins visibly outside the approved standard that have appeared without a requisition.
- Missing, illegible or duplicated labels.
- Bins stored in direct sun, against heat sources, or otherwise outside the -10°C to +70°C service range.
Supply Across India's Manufacturing Clusters
The counter sits at Sector 17, Vashi, which places it inside the Navi Mumbai industrial belt rather than at a distance from it. For plants across Taloja, Rabale and greater Mumbai that means samples can be seen and collected rather than described over the phone, which shortens the sizing stage considerably. The Pune and Nashik corridor, with its automotive and component base, works on the same axis, so a buyer standardising across two plants in Maharashtra can specify once and repeat the codes at both sites without re-running the whole exercise from scratch.
Gujarat brings a different pattern. Ahmedabad's pharmaceutical, engineering and textile machinery units lean on shelf bins and drawer organisers for very small parts, while the foundry and casting cluster around Rajkot pushes bins into rougher handling and hotter ambient conditions, where the Rhino Tuff family and the -10°C to +70°C limit become active parts of the specification. In the south, electronics and precision assembly around Bengaluru and Chennai is where the ESD range stops being optional, and the pump and textile machinery base around Coimbatore is the natural home of the Koala pick bin and the ACO organiser.
Hyderabad's pharmaceutical and engineering units frequently need the material identification and food-safe mark stated on paper for their own documentation, which a single-material fleet makes straightforward. In Delhi NCR and Kolkata, older buildings with mixed shelving inherited over decades make the outside-dimension arithmetic worth doing carefully before ordering. Coastal humidity through the monsoon argues for drying before stacking everywhere along the Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata coasts. For multi-plant companies, one code list also means stock transfers work and a stores officer moving from Tamil Nadu to Karnataka already knows the system — see warehouse storage bins for Indian sites, the Alkon Supra Bins range, and /industries for sector-level mapping.
Frequently asked questions
Is Shreeram Metafusion a manufacturer or a supplier of industrial storage bins?
Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. is an authorised stockist, and has held that position with ALKON Plastics Pvt. Ltd. for over thirty years. ALKON is the manufacturer and describes itself as the manufacturer of the largest range of material handling bins in India. For a buyer this matters in two ways: the bins trace back to one manufacturer rather than to whichever trader quoted lowest that month, and the catalogue codes on your purchase order still mean the same thing when you reorder next year.
How many bins do I need before it is worth standardising?
Standardisation is a repeatability decision rather than a volume decision. If you have one storeroom that will never change, buy what fits and move on. If you have several aisles, more than one plant, or any expectation of new lines being commissioned, the standard pays for itself well before the bin count gets large, because its value lies in reordering, transfers between sites and new joiners understanding the system without training. The practical starting point is a pilot of one aisle with six to ten catalogue codes, run for a month, and only then a plant-wide release.
Which range should I start with if my plant has never standardised before?
Start where the pain is loudest, which for most plants is the small-parts pick face at assembly or the maintenance store, because those areas hold the most part numbers per square metre and therefore have the most to gain. Map the location by category first — bench pick face, shelf front, drawer, WIP buffer, ESD cell, bulk. That mapping usually points to Supra or Hippo bins for the bench, Panda Shelf Bins for shelf fronts, Koala Pick Bins for a worked pick face and ACO Component Organisers for the very small items. Open the dimension tables only after that.
Will these bins work in a cold room or near hot process equipment?
The stated service range is -10°C to +70°C, so cold rooms and chilled storage at the lower end are within specification without special provision. The upper limit needs more care, because it applies to the surface temperature of the bin and not only to the air temperature in the shed. Near heat treatment lines, curing ovens, paint booths, or on a west-facing wall in direct afternoon sun, the surface can run hotter than an ambient reading suggests. Measure the surface temperature at that exact spot across a full shift before committing that location to the standard.
Are the bins food-safe, and does that cover a pharmaceutical packing hall?
All the bin ranges are moulded in polypropylene copolymer, carry resin identification code 05, and carry food-safe and recyclable marks, which is useful in food processing and pharmaceutical packing halls where you routinely need to state what a container in the hall is made of. What the mark does not do is answer every process-specific question your own quality system or a customer audit may raise, and it is not a substitute for your internal validation. Share the exact application when you enquire, and where a specific chemical or cleaning agent is involved, trial a sample bin first.
Can I mix different bin ranges on the same shelving or louvre panel?
You can, and sometimes you must, but treat it as a decision rather than an accident. Bins from one family share geometry, so they nest when empty, stack predictably when full, and present a straight front face across a panel. Mixing families gives a ragged front line with different lip heights, and that is where operators start pushing loose parts into the gaps. Where mixing is genuinely needed, do it by shelf level or panel section rather than side by side within a run, and check the arithmetic on outside dimensions across the full width before ordering.
How do I decide the right size when a part falls between two bins?
Work from inside dimensions for the part and outside dimensions for the structure, because the two differ by wall thickness and taper — a Supra SB 1 is 125 x 100 x 60 mm outside but 117 x 80 x 52 mm inside. Size so that normal running fills the bin to roughly two-thirds, which leaves headroom for a late replenishment and keeps the level visible from the aisle. When a part genuinely falls between sizes, default to the smaller bin and replenish more often. The exception is any part whose absence stops a line, and that exception belongs in the standard in writing.
What should I do about bins in an ESD-protected electronics area?
Use the ESD and conductive safe products for anything crossing into a protected area, and treat the boundary as absolute. An ordinary polypropylene bin inside an EPA quietly undermines the wrist straps, mats and flooring you have already paid for, and the failure surfaces as field returns months later rather than as an alarm on the day. Keep ESD bins in a separate store location with their own block of codes, make them visually distinct from the standard fleet, and write one rule: no non-ESD bin crosses the boundary, including temporarily.
How do I get dimensions, the catalogue and a quotation?
Product listings sit under /products, split across material handling, Panda shelving, Koala pick bins, component organisers, Roo tilt bins, ESD safe products, storage systems and Visipro, with supporting literature under /downloads. For a quotation, send part sizes and weights, the internal dimensions of the shelf, panel or drawer the bins must fit, quantity per location and the environment, along with photographs of the existing setup, to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com or call 93266 29967 or 98201 01937. The counter at Shop-1, Gagangiri CHS, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai 400703 is open Monday to Saturday, 10:00 to 19:00.
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