Panda Bins for Pharmacy in India: Shelf Bins, Transparent Fronts and Pigeon Hole Separation
A pharmacy is one of the very few stores in India where the picker, the customer and the inspector are all standing within three metres of the same shelf. The stock is small, light and numerous, the value per cubic foot is high, and almost every pack carries a date that will eventually turn it into a liability. That combination is why Panda Bins for Pharmacy in India get specified so often. The Panda family from ALKON, held in stock by Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. at Vashi, Navi Mumbai, covers shelf bins, shelving units and pigeon hole units in one moulded polypropylene copolymer system. This page works through sizing against real pack dimensions, where a transparent front earns its cost, how bins support FEFO and expiry visibility, separation for controlled and Schedule H1 stock, cleaning within the material's service limits, and how to buy and roll the system out without buying the wrong thing three hundred times.
What a pharmacy actually needs from a storage bin
Most bin selection advice is written for a factory picking fasteners, and it transfers badly to a medicine counter. In a machine shop the picker owns the shelf, nobody else looks at it, and a washer that sits for two years is still a washer. Behind a chemist's counter the same shelf is a display surface facing a paying customer, the person picking is often also billing, and the stock has a shelf life measured in months. A pharmacy storage bin therefore has to do three jobs at once: hold a small quantity neatly, let the operator identify contents at arm's length without pulling the bin out, and keep one batch separate from the next so the date discipline survives a busy Saturday evening.
The second difference is SKU count against volume. A mid-size retail chemist in Pune or Coimbatore may carry a few thousand distinct items while the total stock would fit into a small van. That is the opposite of a fabrication store, where a handful of item codes fill a whole rack. It means the correct pharmacy bin is small, repeated many hundreds of times, and cheap enough per piece that buying three hundred of them is a sensible decision rather than a capital project. It also means the footprint has to be modular, because the only way to address a few thousand locations is a grid you can number logically from left to right and top to bottom.
Third, a medicine pack is physically awkward in a way a component is not. Blister strips are thin and floppy and slide over each other. Cartons are light enough to be pushed to the back of a deep bin and forgotten. Bottles are tall relative to their base and tip if the bin is shallow. Tubes roll. None of these behave like a bolt, and a bin chosen on volume alone will hold the right litres and still be wrong. The practical specification that comes out of all this is a long, shallow, open-front bin on a shelf, in a hard-wearing wipeable plastic, available with a see-through front where identification matters most.
The Panda Shelf Bin range in plain terms
Panda Shelf Bins run from PSB 301 up to PSB 606, and most of the range is also offered in a transparent "T" version with a clear body so the contents read from the aisle. They are moulded in polypropylene copolymer, carry resin code 05 with food-safe and recyclable marks, and are rated for a service range of minus 10 to plus 70 degrees Celsius. They sit inside a wider family: Panda Shelving Units in the ASU series give you the steelwork and shelf pitch designed around the bins, and Panda Pigeon Hole units in the APH series give fixed compartments where a bin would be too loose. The full family sits under /products/panda-shelving-systems-and-accessories in the catalogue.
It is worth reading one real size closely rather than skimming a table. The PSB 301 measures 315 x 100 x 60 mm outside and 293 x 86 x 55 mm inside. Subtract the two and you learn something useful about every moulded bin: you lose about 22 mm along the length, 14 mm across the width and 5 mm in height to wall thickness, draft angle and the moulded floor. That is roughly 1.39 litres of usable internal volume in a bin that occupies 100 mm of shelf frontage. Always plan against the inside figures. Buyers who lay out a wall using outside dimensions and then discover their carton is 90 mm wide against an 86 mm internal width have to redo the whole exercise.
Where does Panda sit against the other ranges? The Panda shelf bin is long and shallow, designed to be filed into shelf depth. If your storage is a louvre panel or a rail rather than a shelf, the shorter hopper-front bins are usually the better fit: Supra SB 1 at 125 x 100 x 60 mm outside and 117 x 80 x 52 mm inside, or Hippo 612/T at 100 x 110 x 53 mm outside and 80 x 90 x 43 mm inside. For a bench or a picking face, Koala Pick Bins such as AKP-01 at 130 x 105 x 60 mm outside give about half a litre in a nesting shape. Browsing the wider set of industrial storage bins made in India first will save you from forcing one range to do a job another range does better.
Matching PSB sizes to real pharmacy pack sizes
Start by measuring your three worst packs, not your average pack. The average pack never causes a problem. The bin size that fails is the one chosen for a 10 x 10 tablet carton and then asked to hold the one antibiotic that comes in a taller box, or the ointment tube whose carton is 4 mm wider than everything else. Take a vernier or a steel rule, write down length, width and height for the largest carton, the tallest bottle and the most awkward tube in your fastest-moving hundred lines, and use those three numbers as the constraint. Everything else will follow. This single half-hour exercise separates a bin wall that works from one that gets quietly abandoned in six months.
Here is the arithmetic done properly on a PSB 301, internal 293 x 86 x 55 mm. Suppose you measure a tablet carton at 85 x 45 x 20 mm, and please treat that as illustrative only, because carton sizes vary by brand and you must measure your own. The carton's largest face dimension, 85 mm, fits within the bin's 86 mm internal width. The 45 mm dimension fits under the 55 mm internal height. That leaves the 20 mm thickness running front to back along the 293 mm internal length, so the cartons file like index cards and you get about fourteen of them in one bin, every one of them readable by tipping the front carton forward. Check fourteen cartons against your own weekly offtake for that line before deciding it is the right size.
The lesson from that worked example is that the internal width is usually the binding constraint, not the volume. A pharmacy bin fails when the carton's biggest face is wider than the bin's inside width, because then the pack has to lie flat, you can only stack two or three high under the 55 mm internal height, and the front of the bin no longer shows you what is behind it. If your measured carton is 95 mm on its largest face, a PSB 301 is the wrong size no matter how many litres it holds. Step up the PSB ladder, or move sideways to a deeper range. The full dimension sheet for every PSB size is in /downloads, and we would rather you worked from the published table than from a number quoted in a phone call.
For anything that will not file, change range rather than forcing the bin. A 100 ml syrup bottle standing upright is taller than the internal height of the smaller shelf bins, so either lay it down in a wider bin with a partition to stop it rolling, or use a taller open-front bin such as the Bull Bin 5, which is 168 x 102 x 74 mm outside and 145 x 86 x 66 mm inside, about 0.82 litres. For ward-level transfers and bulk holding, a Tote Bin AK-421 at 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside and 365 x 230 x 90 mm inside gives roughly 7.5 litres in a shape that stacks and travels.
- Measure the largest face of your three most awkward packs before choosing anything.
- Compare that largest face against the bin's internal width and internal height, never against outside dimensions.
- Aim for packs that file front to back so the front pack is the one you pick.
- Check the resulting bin capacity against real weekly offtake, not against a round number.
- If a pack needs to be forced, move up a size or change range rather than tolerating it.
Transparent bins and where a clear front earns its cost
The transparent "T" versions of the Panda shelf bins exist for one reason: identification without handling. In a busy Mumbai or Delhi NCR counter, the operator's hand reaching for a bin is the slowest part of the transaction, and every pull-and-replace is a chance for a pack to go back into the wrong slot. A clear body lets the operator confirm the pack, the batch card and the remaining quantity from a metre away. It also shows depletion, which is the cheapest reorder trigger there is: a bin that is visibly one third full at the morning open gives you a reorder signal without opening any software.
There is a second, less obvious benefit that matters specifically for medicines. A transparent bin shows you a leak, a crushed carton or a burst tube on the day it happens rather than at the next stock count. Sticky residue at the bottom of an opaque bin is usually discovered by hand, and by then it has usually spread to the packs around it. In humid coastal conditions in Chennai, Kolkata or the Konkan belt, a clear body also shows softened, swollen or discoloured cartons early, which is a genuine quality signal in a store that does not have a dedicated QA person walking the shelves.
Transparent is not automatically the right answer everywhere. Clear bodies scratch and haze faster than pigmented ones under abrasive cleaning, they offer less label real estate if you write directly on the front, and they cost more per piece. Most important, some products are light-sensitive and should not be sitting in a clear box under bright counter lighting or near a shop front that catches western sun in an Ahmedabad or Rajkot summer. A sensible pattern is transparent bins for the fast-moving A-class lines and the near-expiry watch zone, opaque bins for everything else, and no clear bins at all in the row that faces direct daylight.
FEFO and expiry visibility: making the date the thing you see
Pharmacy runs on First Expiry First Out, not First In First Out, and the two are not the same. A carton received last week can easily carry an earlier expiry than one received six months ago, because manufacturing dates and distributor stock rotation do not arrive in order. The place FEFO usually breaks is not the software and not the register. It breaks inside the bin, at the moment a new lot is dropped on top of an older one and the two become physically indistinguishable. No amount of system discipline recovers from that, because the picker's hand takes whatever is in front of it and moves on.
The strongest rule you can adopt is one batch per bin. When a new lot arrives and the bin still has old stock, the new lot does not go in until the old stock is finished, or it goes into a clearly identified second bin placed to the right of the first. If shelf frontage is tight, the Panda partitions accessory lets you split a single bin into two compartments so that the older batch keeps a physical wall between itself and the newer one. Either way the operator must be able to answer one question without opening anything: which of these two is the older lot? A divider plus a date card on the front answers it. Loose mixing does not.
Make the expiry the most visible thing on the bin, above the product name. A card slipped into the label holder that reads the earliest expiry currently inside the bin, updated when the batch changes, gives a supervisor the ability to walk a whole bay and read dates like a spreadsheet. Many stores in Bengaluru and Hyderabad run a simple three-zone convention: normal stock in its home bin, anything expiring within ninety days moved into a marked bin at eye level, and anything within thirty days pulled to a quarantine bin away from the picking face. That physical hierarchy is what converts an expiry report into an action.
Be clear about what a bin cannot do. A bin is not a system of record and never becomes one. It does not know your batch number, it will not stop somebody putting the wrong pack inside, and it will not raise an alert. Its whole contribution is to make the correct action the easy one and the incorrect action visibly wrong. Pair the bin wall with whatever expiry register or software you already run, and audit the two against each other monthly: pick twenty bins at random, read the front card, open the bin and confirm the batch matches. Twenty bins takes fifteen minutes and tells you whether the discipline is real.
Pigeon hole units for controlled, Schedule H1 and high-value separation
Panda Pigeon Hole units in the APH series give you an array of fixed compartments instead of removable bins. For most storage that is a disadvantage, because you cannot lift a compartment out and carry it to the counter. For controlled and closely tracked stock, that same rigidity is exactly the point. A fixed compartment cannot be swapped, moved to another shelf or taken away to a back room. One item to one hole, with the hole numbered, means a physical count is a matter of looking rather than unpacking, and any gap in the grid is immediately visible to whoever is responsible for the cupboard.
Items that require separate custody and a maintained register, including narcotic and psychotropic stock and Schedule H1 lines, need physical separation from general stock as a matter of routine practice, and the responsible pharmacist decides what the correct legal arrangement is for the premises. What the storage system contributes is the layout inside that arrangement. The lockable cupboard or steel almirah is yours to specify; the pigeon hole unit organises what sits inside it so that each item has one address, the register entry maps to a compartment number, and the daily check is a two-minute visual rather than a search. Do not treat any plastic product, from us or anybody else, as a substitute for a lock and a register.
Pigeon hole layouts earn their keep in other places too. Patient-held items waiting for collection, doctor sample stock that must never mix with saleable stock, ward indents being staged for pickup, and expensive small vials all benefit from an addressed compartment rather than a general bin. In a hospital pharmacy the same unit works well for staging tomorrow's scheduled dispensing by ward, because a half-filled row is instantly visible as incomplete. If you want the shelving and pigeon hole combination worked through in more depth, the note on Panda shelving for pharmacy stores covers the unit choices and layout patterns in detail.
Designing the shelving wall behind the counter
The wall behind a pharmacy counter is a piece of ergonomics, not just carpentry. Work out three bands before you order anything. The golden band, roughly between mid-thigh and eye level, takes your fastest fifty to a hundred lines and should be transparent bins with the clearest labelling. Above eye level goes slow-moving and bulk backup, because reaching up is acceptable twice a day but not fifty times. Below knee level goes heavy, low-turn and non-urgent stock. Getting this wrong is the single biggest cause of a well-built bin wall being slower in practice than the old cupboard it replaced.
Then do the arithmetic. A PSB 301 occupies 100 mm of shelf frontage and needs 315 mm of shelf depth. A clear bay of 1200 mm therefore holds twelve bins in a row, and a 300 mm deep shelf will leave the bin overhanging by 15 mm, which is either acceptable or a reason to specify a deeper shelf. Set the shelf pitch by adding hand clearance to the 60 mm bin height; anything under about 160 mm makes retrieval a knuckle-scraping exercise. Six levels at 200 mm pitch over 1200 mm of wall height gives seventy-two addressable locations in one bay, which is a number you can actually plan a store around.
Decide next whether you are hanging bins on your existing shelving or buying the matched steelwork. Panda Shelving Units in the ASU series are built around the bin footprints and save you the trial-and-error of pitch and depth, and the accessory range adds louvre panels, rails, a universal rail, stands and trolleys for the cases where a wall panel beats a shelf. Existing shop shelving can absolutely be reused, but measure the clear width between uprights rather than the nominal bay size, because the bracket intrusion is what decides whether you get eleven bins across or twelve.
Site conditions in India deserve their own line in the plan. Many Navi Mumbai and central Mumbai shops have narrow frontage and one usable long wall, so the bin wall has to run past the billing position without blocking it. Older premises frequently have a partition wall that will not carry a loaded shelving bay, which pushes you to a floor-standing unit rather than a wall-mounted panel. Monsoon damp along the western coast argues for keeping the lowest shelf clear of the floor, and stores in Nashik or Pune with a shutter that opens directly to the street should keep the outermost bay away from splash and dust. None of this is exotic, but it is far easier to allow for now than to correct after installation.
- Measure clear width between uprights, not nominal bay width.
- Confirm shelf depth against the bin length before ordering, allowing for any overhang you will accept.
- Set shelf pitch at bin height plus at least 100 mm of hand and label clearance.
- Put the fastest lines between thigh and eye level; nothing else.
- Number bays, levels and positions in one consistent direction and print that scheme onto the labels.
Hospital medicine stores, ward sub-stores and crash carts
A hospital pharmacy is really three storage problems stacked on top of one another. The central store is a warehouse in miniature, receiving in cases and issuing in indents. The dispensing counter is a retail pharmacy with more urgency. The ward sub-store is a small, high-consequence cupboard where the person picking is a nurse in the middle of a shift, not a storekeeper. Each of these needs a different bin, and one of the most common mistakes we see in Maharashtra and Gujarat hospitals is a single bin size ordered in bulk for all three because it made the procurement note simpler to write.
The transfer between those layers is where tote bins pay for themselves. A Tote Bin AK-421, internal 365 x 230 x 90 mm and roughly 7.5 litres, is a sensible ward indent container: large enough for a shift's worth of oral solids and ampoule cartons, small enough for one person to carry, and stackable on a trolley for a multi-ward round. Issue against a picking list into the tote, tag it, and let the ward return the empty on the next round. The count of totes in circulation then becomes a crude but real control over how much stock is sitting outside the pharmacy at any moment.
Crash carts and emergency trays are a separate discipline again. What matters there is not capacity but instant completeness: anyone opening the cart must see in one glance whether an item is missing. Fixed compartments beat loose bins for this, which is why pigeon hole style layouts and small addressed bins work better than a general drawer. Keep every compartment single-item, keep the layout identical on every cart in the hospital so that a nurse moving between floors does not have to relearn it, and rebuild to a printed layout card after every use. The crash cart accessory and the smaller bin ranges in the catalogue at /products cover the physical side; the discipline is yours.
Distributors and pharmacy warehouses: from pick bins to bulk
A pharmaceutical distributor has the opposite problem to a retail chemist. The SKU count is similar or higher, but the movement is case-in and break-bulk-out, with a picking round that has to be fast and accurate against a printed order. Here the shelf bin is only part of the answer. Koala Pick Bins in the AKP series are built for a picking face, and the AKP-01 at 130 x 105 x 60 mm outside with 105 x 90 x 55 mm inside gives about half a litre in a nesting shape that survives being grabbed thousands of times. Koala shelving matches the bins, and the range sits at /products/koala-pick-bins.
Above pick-face size, the choice widens. Bull Bins run from size 5 to size 55, with the Bull Bin 5 at 168 x 102 x 74 mm outside giving 0.82 litres in a robust hopper front. Rhino Tuff Bins in the ARTB series cover the same open-front idea in a harder-wearing form, the ARTB-05 measuring 109 x 104 x 49 mm outside and 95 x 89 x 43 mm inside. For bulk and break-bulk holding, Mammoth Bins in mesh or solid versions measure 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside and 740 x 250 x 290 mm inside, which is roughly 53 litres per bin and a sensible home for loose consolidated stock or returns awaiting decision.
Warehouse traffic introduces damage that a retail counter never sees. Pallet trucks and stackers clip rack uprights, and the first sign is usually a bent leg holding several tonnes of stock. Visipro rack protectors, at /products/visipro, are cheap insurance in any facility running powered handling equipment, and distribution sheds around Bhiwandi, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and the NCR industrial belts almost always need them at aisle entries and turning points. Protecting the rack also protects the bins, because a rack that has been struck no longer sits level and bins begin to creep forward on the shelf.
Give returns and quarantine their own physical zone rather than a corner of the live picking face. Expiry returns, damaged stock, batch holds and customer returns awaiting credit are all items that must not be picked by accident, and the cheapest way to guarantee that is distance plus a different bin colour plus a physical barrier. Mammoth bins or totes on a separate bay away from the pick aisle, clearly labelled, with a written rule that nothing leaves that bay without a signature, will prevent more losses in a year than any amount of software configuration.
ACO component organisers for ampoules, sutures and very small items
Some pharmacy stock is too small for a shelf bin and too valuable to lose in one. Single ampoules, suture packs, needles, small vials, dental consumables and the endless small sundries a hospital store accumulates all suffer the same fate in a general bin: they migrate to the bottom, they get counted wrong, and they get damaged. ACO Component Organisers are cabinets of small drawers built for exactly this class of item. The ACO 18 measures 457 mm high, 424 mm wide and 164 mm deep, which is a footprint you can wall-mount above a bench or stand on a counter without giving up any serious floor space.
The value of a drawer cabinet is that it converts a search into a lookup. Number the drawers, keep one item per drawer, and print an index card that lives on the cabinet door. New staff then find a suture size in seconds rather than opening six containers. Wall-mounting keeps the bench clear and puts the labels at reading height; bench-standing suits a preparation area where the operator is seated. If you are comparing drawer counts and cabinet sizes, the summary of component organisers for very small items lists the options, and the products themselves sit under /products/components-organisers.
Know the limits before you buy. Small drawers are not the place for anything that can leak, because a spill inside a closed drawer is discovered late and spreads to the drawers below. They are also not a substitute for a lock: a drawer cabinet organises controlled items neatly but provides no custody, so it belongs inside a lockable cupboard when the stock demands one. And watch total loaded weight on a wall-mounted cabinet, particularly on a plastered brick partition in an older building, where the fixing rather than the cabinet is usually the weak point.
Cleaning, hygiene, spills and temperature limits
Every bin range described here is moulded in polypropylene copolymer, carries resin code 05 and the food-safe and recyclable marks, and is rated for service from minus 10 to plus 70 degrees Celsius. Those facts are worth reading carefully rather than as reassurance. The food-safe and recyclable marks describe the moulded material and its identification; they are not a pharmacopoeial certification, not a claim about direct contact with a dosage form, and not a substitute for whatever your own quality system requires. Medicines in a pharmacy sit in their own primary packaging inside the bin, which is the normal and correct arrangement.
The temperature range decides three practical questions. Cold-chain storage at 2 to 8 degrees is comfortably inside the range, so bins can be used inside a pharmacy refrigerator or cold room provided they are sized to allow air circulation and are not blocking the evaporator. Deep-freeze storage at minus 20 is outside the stated range and should not be assumed. At the hot end, plus 70 rules out autoclaving, steam cleaning and hot-water washing, all of which will distort a bin permanently. It also means a bin left on a metal roof-lit mezzanine through an Ahmedabad or Nagpur summer afternoon deserves a check, because trapped heat above a false ceiling climbs further than people expect.
For routine cleaning, warm water below the service limit with a mild detergent, a soft cloth and thorough drying handles almost everything. Wipe-down with isopropyl alcohol is normal practice in dispensing areas and is generally tolerated, but repeated aggressive solvent contact and abrasive scouring pads will haze transparent bodies and should be avoided. Keep a small float of spare bins so a bin can be taken out of service, washed and dried properly rather than wiped in place while full. Set a simple schedule: high-touch counter bins monthly, general shelf bins quarterly, and any bin immediately after a spill, with the surrounding bins checked at the same time.
Ten ways a pharmacy bin system fails, and how to design them out
The most common failure is overfilling. A bin sized for one week's stock receives a month's supply because the distributor gave a scheme, the excess is pushed in, packs stand proud of the front lip, and within a fortnight the neighbouring bins are contaminated with strays. The fix is not a bigger bin, because a bigger bin simply invites a bigger overfill. The fix is a defined maximum fill marked on the bin and a defined home for surplus: a bulk backup location above eye level, or a tote on a separate bay, from which the bin is topped up. Once bulk and pick stock have different addresses, overfilling stops being possible.
The second failure is labelling. Handwritten labels fade, adhesive labels peel in humid coastal air, and labels stuck to the bin rather than to the shelf mean the address moves whenever somebody carries a bin to the counter and puts it back one slot to the left. Use the label holder, print rather than write, and give the location a code that belongs to the shelf position, not to the bin. Then a bin in the wrong slot is a visible mismatch instead of an invisible one. This single change is what makes a random-sample audit meaningful rather than decorative.
Third is the wrong depth. Long shelf bins are excellent when packs file front to back and every pack is reachable; they are terrible when small loose items sink to the rear. If you find yourself tipping a bin out to see the back of it, either the item belongs in a shorter bin from the Supra, Hippo or Koala ranges, or a partition should split the length so the rear half is a deliberate reserve rather than an accidental graveyard. The specific pharmacy risk here is that the oldest expiry hides at the back, which quietly defeats every FEFO rule you have written down.
The remaining failures are all drift. Bins get borrowed for other purposes, a temporary item takes a permanent slot, one staff member starts a private arrangement in the corner of a bay, and six months later the map no longer matches the wall. The counter to drift is a short recurring audit rather than a big annual clean-up. Twenty random bins a month, checked for correct item, correct front card, correct expiry and no strays, takes a quarter of an hour and catches problems while they are still small. Record the pass rate somewhere visible and the number will improve on its own.
- Bin holds a defined maximum fill; bulk lives somewhere else with its own address.
- Label belongs to the shelf location, not to the bin.
- One batch per bin, or a partition and two front cards.
- Earliest expiry written on the front card and updated when the batch changes.
- No loose strays: a pack found in the wrong bin is a recorded audit failure, not a shrug.
- Twenty random bins checked every month, pass rate posted on the wall.
Buying, sampling and rolling out: a procurement note
Never order a bin wall in one go. Order five to ten pieces each of your two most likely sizes, put them into live use on the busiest bay for a fortnight, and let the staff who actually pick decide. Two weeks is long enough to expose the pack that will not fit, the label position that is unreadable under your lighting, and the shelf pitch that is 20 mm too tight. The cost of a sample batch is trivial against the cost of discovering after a bulk order that your largest carton faces are wider than the internal width you specified. This is the single most valuable step in the whole exercise.
When you do specify, specify the accessories with the bins rather than afterwards. Partitions decide whether one bin can hold two batches, louvre panels and the universal rail decide whether bins hang on a wall instead of eating shelf depth, and stands and trolleys decide whether a bay can be reconfigured without drilling. The catalogue runs to 476 or more products across nine ranges, and the dimension sheets in /downloads carry the exact figures for sizes not quoted on this page. If you want to see the ranges side by side before narrowing down, the overview of the manufacturer's storage bin range is the quickest way to compare shapes.
On supply: ALKON Plastics Pvt. Ltd. is the manufacturer, described as the manufacturer of the largest range of material handling bins in India, and Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. has been an authorised stockist for over thirty years, working from Shop-1, Gagangiri Chs, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai 400703. Being in Navi Mumbai means same-city delivery across the MMR and straightforward road dispatch to Pune, Nashik and the rest of Maharashtra, with regular movement to Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, West Bengal and the NCR. Most of these bins nest, which matters more than it sounds: nested cartons cut freight volume substantially on a long haul to Coimbatore, Rajkot or Kolkata.
Roll out in three steps rather than one. First, a single pilot bay with real stock, a numbering scheme and printed labels, run for two weeks. Second, the full wall behind the counter, ideally scheduled during or immediately after a stock-take so that every bin is filled with counted, dated stock rather than whatever was lying around. Third, the back store, the cold room and any ward sub-stores, using what you learned in the first two phases. To discuss sizes against your own measured packs, call 93266 29967 or 98201 01937, write to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com, or come to the Vashi shop between 10:00 and 19:00, Monday to Saturday. The industry pages at /industries and the enquiry form at /contact cover the rest.
- Sample two candidate sizes in live use for a fortnight before bulk ordering.
- Fix your numbering scheme and print labels before the bins arrive, not after.
- Order partitions, rails and panels in the same order as the bins.
- Time the main installation to a stock-take so bins start life with counted stock.
- Keep a small float of spare bins so cleaning never has to happen in place.
Frequently asked questions
Which Panda Shelf Bin size should a retail chemist start with?
Start by measuring the largest face of your three most awkward packs, then compare that against internal, not outside, dimensions. The PSB 301 is internal 293 x 86 x 55 mm, about 1.39 litres, and it suits slim cartons and blister strips that can file front to back. If your typical carton is wider than 86 mm on its largest face, step up the PSB ladder rather than laying packs flat. In practice most counters end up with two or three sizes across the wall rather than one, and the only reliable way to pick them is to trial five to ten pieces of each in live use for a fortnight.
Are transparent Panda bins worth the extra cost for medicines?
For fast-moving lines and for your near-expiry watch zone, generally yes. A clear body lets the operator confirm the pack and the remaining quantity without pulling the bin out, which removes the main opportunity for a pack to go back into the wrong slot. It also reveals a leaking tube or a crushed carton on the day it happens instead of at the next count. The exceptions are light-sensitive stock and any row facing direct daylight, where an opaque bin is safer, and areas cleaned aggressively, since clear bodies haze faster under abrasive pads. A mixed wall with transparent bins only where identification speed matters is usually the best value.
Can these bins be used inside a pharmacy refrigerator or cold room?
The stated service range for the bin ranges is minus 10 to plus 70 degrees Celsius, so normal cold-chain storage at 2 to 8 degrees is comfortably within it. Size the bins so air can circulate around them and make sure nothing blocks the evaporator or the door seal, because a bin that restricts airflow will create a warm pocket regardless of how good the unit is. Deep-freeze storage at around minus 20 degrees falls outside the stated range and should not be assumed. As always, your own cold-chain validation and temperature mapping govern what is acceptable inside that equipment.
How do I stop two batches getting mixed inside one bin?
Adopt one batch per bin as a written rule. When a new lot arrives while old stock remains, either hold the new lot in a bulk backup location until the bin empties, or split the bin with a partition so the two batches have a physical wall between them and give each half its own front card. Then write the earliest expiry currently inside the bin on that card and update it when the batch changes. This is the point where FEFO usually fails in practice, because once two lots are physically indistinguishable no software or register can recover the sequence for the person picking.
Can Panda Pigeon Hole units be used for narcotic and Schedule H1 stock?
The APH pigeon hole units give fixed, numbered compartments that suit one item per hole and make a physical count a visual check rather than a search, which is exactly what closely tracked stock needs. What they do not provide is custody. Items that require separate custody and a maintained register belong inside the lockable cupboard or almirah your responsible pharmacist specifies, with the pigeon hole unit organising the contents inside that enclosure. Treat the plastic as layout and addressing, never as a substitute for a lock, a register or the legal arrangement your premises requires.
Do I need Panda shelving units, or can I use my existing shop shelving?
Existing shelving works perfectly well if the numbers line up. Measure the clear width between uprights rather than the nominal bay size, because bracket intrusion decides whether you get eleven or twelve bins across, and check that your shelf depth covers the bin length; a PSB 301 needs 315 mm and will overhang a 300 mm shelf by 15 mm. Set shelf pitch at bin height plus at least 100 mm of hand and label clearance. The ASU Panda shelving units are built around these bin footprints and save you the trial and error, which is worth it for a large installation but rarely for a single bay.
How should pharmacy bins be cleaned, and how often?
Warm water below the plus 70 degree service limit with a mild detergent, a soft cloth and thorough drying handles routine cleaning. Isopropyl wipe-down is normal in dispensing areas and is generally fine, but avoid abrasive scouring pads and repeated aggressive solvent contact, particularly on transparent bodies which haze. Autoclaving, steam cleaning and hot-water washing are all outside the material's range and will distort the bin permanently. A workable schedule is monthly for high-touch counter bins, quarterly for general shelf bins, and immediately after any spill, with the surrounding bins checked at the same time.
What is the right bin for moving stock from a hospital store to the wards?
A Tote Bin AK-421 is the usual answer. It measures 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside and 365 x 230 x 90 mm inside, roughly 7.5 litres, which holds a shift's worth of oral solids and ampoule cartons while staying light enough for one person to carry and stackable on a trolley for a multi-ward round. Issue against a printed picking list into the tote, tag it, and take the empty back on the next round. Counting the totes in circulation then gives you a simple physical measure of how much stock is sitting outside the pharmacy.
Do you supply outside Navi Mumbai, and what quantity should I order first?
Yes. The shop is at Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai, which makes same-city and MMR delivery straightforward and gives easy road dispatch to Pune, Nashik and across Maharashtra, with regular movement to Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, West Bengal and the NCR. Most ranges nest, which reduces freight volume noticeably on longer hauls. On quantity, order a sample batch of five to ten pieces in two candidate sizes first, run them in live use for two weeks, and only then place the bulk order. Call 93266 29967 or 98201 01937, or write to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com with your measured pack dimensions.
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