Warehouse Storage Bins in India: Slotting, Picking Faces and Rack-Mounted Bins
Warehouse storage bins in India are usually bought as a commodity — a size, a colour and a quantity on a purchase order — and then spend the next ten years quietly deciding how fast your stores team can pick, how accurate your counts are, and how much of your shelf face is wasted. This page is about that second life rather than the purchase. It covers slotting, the golden zone, bin faces and how many of them fit on a running metre, labelling and location codes, the choice between rack bins, shelf bins, wall units and tilt bins, trolleys and batch picking, cycle counting at bin level, and the damage patterns that destroy both bins and racking. Every product reference is to the ALKON range that Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. stocks from Vashi, Navi Mumbai, with catalogue dimensions quoted wherever the millimetres actually matter.
What a picking bin is actually being asked to do
On an Indian stores floor the word bin covers two completely different jobs, and they pull in opposite directions. A Supra SB 1 at 125 x 100 x 60 mm outside, hung on a louvre panel at chest height, exists to present one small component face-on so that a picker's hand goes in and comes out in a couple of seconds. A Mammoth bin at 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside exists to hold a week's worth of that same component somewhere else in the building. Both are warehouse bins. Most poor bin decisions begin by buying one when the requirement was the other, and the mistake only surfaces months later as slow picking or as rows of bins sitting two-thirds empty.
Every ALKON bin range is moulded in polypropylene copolymer, carries resin code 05 along with food-safe and recyclable marks, and has a stated service range of -10°C to +70°C. On the floor that matters in ordinary ways rather than dramatic ones. There is no rust to bleed on to plated components, an oil-soaked bin can be washed and put back the same shift, cut edges do not splinter and snag a glove, and the bin holds its shape in the roof space of a tin-sheeted shed in Ahmedabad or Rajkot, where the air above the top rack level is considerably hotter than the aisle temperature anybody actually measured.
Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. has been an authorised stockist of ALKON Plastics Pvt. Ltd. for over thirty years, working out of Shop-1, Gagangiri CHS, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai. ALKON describes itself as the manufacturer of the largest range of material handling bins in India, and the catalogue we hold runs to 476-plus products across nine ranges — Supra, Hippo, Bull, Rhino Tuff, Tote, Mammoth, Panda, Koala and Roo — together with ACO component organisers, ESD-safe items and Visipro rack protectors. The full listing sits at /products, grouped the same way the printed catalogue is grouped so that a stores team can cross-refer without translating names.
The rest of this page assumes something specific: a bin is never bought alone. It is bought together with a mounting method, a label, a location code and a counting rule, and those four decisions determine whether the bin earns its keep or simply occupies space. A well-chosen picking bin sitting on an unlabelled shelf with no address is just a plastic box that somebody has to search. The sections below therefore run in the order a stores in-charge actually has to decide things — starting with slotting, and ending with what to do after a pallet truck clips the aisle end for the third time this year.
Slotting: choose the bin from the part, not from the shelf
Slotting is the decision about which part lives in which bin at which address, and it is the single highest-leverage thing a stores in-charge controls without spending capital. The inputs are not exotic. How many pick lines does the part generate in a week, how much cube does one pick take, how often does the bin need refilling, how heavy does a full bin become for one hand, and is the item picked on its own or always as part of a kit? Run that arithmetic across your top two hundred lines before specifying a single bin, because the answer changes which sizes you buy, not merely where you put them.
It helps to think in a ladder of real dimensions rather than in vague small-medium-large language that means different things to the buyer and the storekeeper. Taken from the catalogue, an honest ladder for a picking face looks like the list below. Read the inside dimension, not the outside one — the inside figure is what a component has to fit into, while the outside figure is what the shelf layout has to accommodate. Both numbers are needed, and confusing them is the commonest specification error we see on enquiries from new plants in Pune, Chennai and Hosur.
Notice how much wall thickness and draft taper take away between the two figures. A Supra SB 1 loses 8 mm of length, 20 mm of width and 8 mm of depth between outside and inside. A Panda Shelf Bin 301 is 315 mm long outside but 293 mm inside, which is exactly the difference between a 300 mm stock length lying flat and not going in at all. A Tote AK-421 is 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside and 365 x 230 x 90 mm inside, so a 380 mm sub-assembly that a design engineer assumed would travel in a tote will not. Check the longest part in each family against the inside figure before the order goes out.
The opposite error is standardising on a single size because it makes the purchase order tidy. One size means either half the bins run two-thirds empty and waste the shelf face that fast movers need, or the busiest items sit in bins too small to hold a sensible replenishment quantity, so a storekeeper spends the afternoon topping up instead of picking. Three to five sizes, chosen deliberately and used across every plant and every branch, is the practical target. The numbered series exist for this reason: Supra runs SB 1 to SB 8 plus SB 7X, and Bull Bins run 5 through 55, so a ladder can be built without mixing ranges and mixing mounting details.
- Rhino Tuff ARTB-05 — 109 x 104 x 49 mm outside, 95 x 89 x 43 mm inside
- Hippo 612/T — 100 x 110 x 53 mm outside, 80 x 90 x 43 mm inside
- Supra SB 1 — 125 x 100 x 60 mm outside, 117 x 80 x 52 mm inside
- Koala AKP-01 — 130 x 105 x 60 mm outside, 105 x 90 x 55 mm inside
- Bull Bin 5 — 168 x 102 x 74 mm outside, 145 x 86 x 66 mm inside
- Panda Shelf Bin PSB 301 — 315 x 100 x 60 mm outside, 293 x 86 x 55 mm inside
- Tote AK-421 — 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside, 365 x 230 x 90 mm inside
- Mammoth — 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside, 740 x 250 x 290 mm inside
The golden zone, and what actually deserves to be in it
The golden zone is the vertical band where a picker can take a part without bending, stretching or climbing — roughly between the top of the thigh and the top of the shoulder for the person doing the job. Everything in that band is picked at full speed. Everything above or below it costs extra seconds and, in the case of a high shelf, may cost a step stool and a stopped picker. In a stores with mixed male and female pickers, and the range of statures normal across an Indian workforce, the safe assumption is a narrower golden band than the one an imported layout drawing assumes. Measure it with your own team standing at your own shelving.
Once the band is defined, rank your SKUs by pick lines per week and fill the band from the top of that list downward. In most spares and assembly stores a small minority of part numbers generate the large majority of pick lines, so a surprisingly short list fills the prime face. Slower movers go above shoulder height, where a rarely used Panda shelf bin or pigeon hole compartment costs nothing in daily time. Heavy, bulky and awkward items go low — knee height and below — because lifting a loaded bin down from above shoulder height is where back injuries and dropped stock come from.
The tension nobody warns you about is between velocity slotting and family slotting. Storekeepers naturally want all the bearings together, all the fasteners together, all the seals together, because that is how their memory works and how the ERP prints the list. Pure velocity slotting breaks that comfort and makes the store unreadable to a new hire. The workable compromise is family blocks placed within velocity bands: keep each family contiguous, but move the whole family up or down the rack according to how hard it is worked. Review it once a quarter, because a new model at a Nashik or Coimbatore plant can change a family's velocity within a month.
Bin faces: the open front is the real user interface
Open-front bins — Supra, Hippo, Bull, Rhino Tuff, Panda shelf bins and Koala pick bins — all share one design idea: a cut-away front lip that lets the picker see the contents and reach in without lifting the bin. That face is the interface. Its height decides whether a hand fits in when the bin is half full, its width decides how many part numbers you can present per metre of shelf, and its clarity decides whether the picker reads the label from the aisle or walks up to it. Everything else about the bin — material, colour, moulding — is secondary to how that face behaves at pick speed.
Once you accept that, shelf face becomes the scarce resource and you can do arithmetic with it. A Supra SB 1 is 100 mm wide outside, so roughly ten bin faces fit on a running metre of shelf. A Bull Bin 5 at 102 mm wide gives about nine. A Panda Shelf Bin 301 is 100 mm wide but 315 mm deep, which is the point of that range: it buys depth for stock quantity without spending face width. When a stores team complains it has run out of space, the number that has actually run out is almost always face metres in the golden zone, not cubic metres in the building.
Depth cuts both ways. A 315 mm deep bin holds a useful quantity, but the picker's hand has to travel to the back, and by the time the bin is one-third full the remaining stock is out of sight behind the front lip. This is where the transparent T versions of the Panda shelf bins earn their place — a storekeeper can see the back of the bin, and a supervisor walking the aisle can see a near-empty bin without pulling it. For deep bins holding many small identical parts, the transparent version usually pays for itself in avoided stock-outs rather than in picking seconds.
Roo tilt bins solve the same visibility problem a different way. The bin tilts forward on its mounting so the mouth faces upward and toward the picker, and the contents present themselves without any reaching in. That is excellent for loose fasteners, terminals and clips at an assembly bench, and poor for anything that must stay clean, must not mix with the bin next to it, or gets knocked out when a trolley passes. We have written the trade-off up in detail in the comparison of tilt bins versus open-front bins, because it is the question buyers ask most often after they have already bought one of each.
Rack bins, shelf bins, wall units and tilt bins: choosing the carrier
The bin is half the decision; the carrier is the other half. There are four practical carriers and they have very different cost and flexibility profiles. Rack bins hang from louvre panels or rails fixed to existing pallet rack uprights and beams. Shelf bins sit on shelving — either purpose-built Panda shelving units from the ASU series or the slotted-angle shelving already in your store. Wall-mounted panels and RTBW tilt bin wall units use vertical wall space near the point of use. And mobile carriers — stands, trolleys and crash carts — bring bins to the work instead of the other way round.
Rack-mounted bins are the right answer when you already have pallet racking and want a picking face without adding a separate structure. Louvre panels bolted between uprights turn dead beam-level space into bin face, and a universal rail lets bins be repositioned by hand, without tools, when slotting changes. That last property matters more than it sounds: a picking face that cannot be reconfigured in an evening will not be reconfigured at all, and within a year the slotting will be whatever it was on day one plus a decade of accumulated exceptions written on tape.
Purpose-built shelving is the right answer when the store is small-parts dominated and the racking is elsewhere. Panda shelving units in the ASU series are built around the shelf bin footprint, so the shelf pitch and the bin depth agree instead of fighting; the Panda pigeon hole APH covers documents, drawings, kitted sets and returnable tooling that does not want an open-front bin at all. This is a common pattern in maintenance stores at process plants around Hyderabad and in electrical panel shops in Delhi NCR, where the store is one room rather than one aisle of a warehouse.
Wall units deserve a mention on their own, because they are the carrier most often forgotten during a layout exercise. RTB and RTBW tilt bin wall units put fasteners, clips and consumables on a vertical surface that was otherwise carrying nothing but paint, directly beside the bench or the machine where those items get consumed. In a line-side situation that is often better than a beautifully slotted store aisle forty metres away, because the walk is what costs you. A short set of decision rules covers most of the remaining cases; use them as a starting position, then test them against your real aisle widths and pick paths before committing to a quantity.
- Existing pallet racking, picking face needed fast, slotting still changing — louvre panels plus rail-mounted bins on the rack.
- Dedicated small-parts store, thousands of low-velocity SKUs, stable slotting — Panda shelf bins in ASU shelving units.
- Point-of-use at a bench or line-side, loose small items, single operator — Roo tilt bins on RTB or RTBW wall units.
- Order picking across a route, multiple orders per trip — tote bins on trolleys and crash carts, not fixed bins.
- Documents, kits, returnable tools, anything that must not be scooped — Panda pigeon hole APH rather than open-front bins.
- Static bulk holding behind or below the pick face — Mammoth bins, mesh where visibility helps, solid where dust does not.
Labelling and location coding that survives contact with the floor
The first rule of bin labelling is that the location gets the address, not the bin. A bin moves — to the wash area, to the line, to another shelf during a reslot — and if the address travelled with it, the address is now wrong in two places at once. So the shelf edge, the rail or the louvre panel carries a location code such as A-04-C-07 (aisle, bay, level, position), and the bin carries the part number, description and any handling note. When a bin is emptied and refilled with a different item, only the bin label changes, and the map in your ERP still holds good.
Where the label physically sits is worth ten minutes of argument before you print two thousand of them. A label on the front lip of an open-front bin is readable from the aisle but takes the beating from every hand that reaches in. A label on the shelf edge below the bin survives longer and stays put when the bin travels, but it becomes wrong the moment somebody slides the bin sideways by 30 mm. On transparent shelf bins, resist the instinct to stick the label across the clear window — you paid for visibility and then covered it. Use the solid lip or the shelf edge instead.
Keep the human-readable text large enough to read from normal aisle standing distance, and treat the barcode as an addition rather than a replacement, because scanners fail and people do not. Colour is genuinely useful but only if it carries exactly one meaning across the whole site — zone, or category, or hazard, and never two of them in different aisles. The checklist below is what we suggest a stores team confirms before the label roll is ordered, because reprinting a whole store's labels is a weekend nobody enjoys, whether the store is in Bhiwandi, Chakan or Sriperumbudur.
- Location code lives on the shelf edge or rail; part number lives on the bin.
- Human-readable part number readable from the aisle without stepping in.
- Barcode or 2D code present, and actually tested with your own scanner at your own light levels.
- One meaning per colour, documented on a board in the store, same across all sites.
- No label covering the clear window of a transparent bin.
- A written rule for who prints replacements, so handwritten labels never start.
Partitions, organisers and the very small parts problem
Below a certain size, giving a part its own bin wastes more face than it saves time. Partitions solve part of this: length and width dividers split a Supra, Bull or Panda shelf bin into two or three compartments, so a single bin face can present three low-velocity items instead of one. This is the right move for slow-moving variants of the same family — three lengths of the same screw, three thicknesses of the same washer — where the picker is already standing at the right face and only has to choose within it. It is the wrong move when the compartments will hold items that a tired picker at the end of a shift can confuse.
For genuinely small, genuinely numerous items, an ACO component organiser is a better answer than any number of partitioned bins. The ACO 18 cabinet measures 457 mm high x 424 mm wide x 164 mm deep, so it takes a very modest slice of a bench or wall and holds a large count of discrete part numbers in individual drawers. Maintenance stores, instrumentation rooms, panel-building shops and tool cribs use these for fuses, terminals, O-rings, grub screws and lugs — the items that are worth almost nothing individually and stop a line completely when they are missing. The full set is listed under /products/components-organisers.
There is a real limit to subdivision, and mis-picks are how you find it. Every time two visually similar items share a face, the probability that the wrong one goes into the kit rises, and the cost of that error is paid at assembly or at the customer, not in the store. The practical test is simple: stand at the face, glance for one second, and ask whether you could tell the two compartments apart without reading. If not, separate them by distance rather than by a divider, or change one of the two labels to a different colour and accept the extra face metre. Partitions must never become a way to avoid buying the right small bin.
Trolleys, crash carts and batch picking
Once a store issues more than a handful of orders per shift, the biggest single time cost stops being the pick and becomes the walk. Batch picking attacks that directly: the picker carries several orders at once, one tote bin per order, and makes one pass down the aisle instead of four. A Tote AK-421 at 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside is a sensible one-order container for small parts and spares work, and the AK-422 covers the cases where a different container size is needed. The rule that makes it work is strict: one tote is bound to one order for the whole trip, and it is labelled the moment it goes on the trolley.
Trolley design decides how many orders per pass you can realistically run. Totes should be reachable without the picker putting anything down, the levels should not force a bend below knee height while carrying weight, and the cart should be narrow enough for two carts to pass in your actual aisle — which is often narrower than the drawing once bins protrude on both sides. Rails, stands and trolleys in the accessory range let you build the cart around the tote footprint rather than balancing totes on a general-purpose platform. We have gone into the layout arithmetic in the note on how to cut picking time through bin layout.
Crash carts serve a different purpose and deserve separate treatment. These are pre-kitted mobile sets that travel to a breakdown — a plant maintenance team in a Gujarat process unit, a facilities team at a Bengaluru campus, a line changeover crew at a Chennai auto ancillary. The value is entirely in the discipline: the cart holds a fixed list of items in fixed bins, the bins are labelled with that list, and the cart is restocked to the list after every single use. Without a fixed list a crash cart becomes a mobile scrap bin within two months, and the first thing anybody urgently needs from it is the one thing missing.
Cycle counting at bin level
The bin is the natural unit of an inventory count, which is why counting by location beats counting by part number almost everywhere. A counter given an aisle and a level walks a straight line and counts what is physically there, then reconciles against what the system says should be at that address. A counter given a part number list walks the whole store in a random order and eventually finds three different bins holding the same item. If you have built location codes properly, a cycle count of a full aisle becomes a bounded, repeatable job of known duration — which is the only way the programme survives past the second month.
Bin choice makes visual counting much cheaper. Transparent T versions of the Panda shelf bins let a supervisor read fill level down the aisle without lifting anything. Mesh Mammoth bins do the same job at bulk scale, where a solid bin would hide the fact that the bottom third is empty. Marking a minimum level on the inside face of the bin turns a count into a glance for the fast movers, and a two-bin arrangement — two identical bins on one face, pull from the front, refill when the front one empties — replaces counting altogether for cheap, high-volume consumables like fasteners and washers.
Set the count frequency from pick frequency, not from value. The expensive assembly picked twice a year does not drift; the low-value fastener touched forty times a week does, and it is the one that stops the line when the system says twelve and the bin says zero. A workable pattern for most Indian stores is monthly counts on the fastest-moving face, quarterly on the middle band and annual on the slow tail, with an immediate recount rule whenever a picker reports a mismatch. Write the rule on the store notice board, because a counting programme that lives only in a spreadsheet stops the first week the supervisor is on leave.
- Count by location code, never by part number list.
- Frequency follows pick lines per week, not item value.
- Any picker-reported mismatch triggers a recount of that bin the same day.
- Fill line marked inside fast-moving bins so a glance replaces a count.
- Transparent or mesh bins wherever the count is visual rather than piece-by-piece.
- Recount before, not after, a reslot — otherwise you will never know which caused the variance.
Reserve stock, totes and the replenishment layer
A picking face works only if something reliably refills it. That means three layers rather than one: the pick face in the golden zone, a reserve layer close by holding one or two replenishment cycles, and bulk holding wherever the space is cheapest. The mistake is to make the pick face carry all three — the bins get bigger, the face metres get consumed, the golden zone runs out and the fast movers get pushed to the floor and the top shelf. Keep the face small and fast, and put the volume behind it or above it, where walking distance and reach both cost you much less per pick.
Mammoth bins are the usual answer for that middle and bulk layer, at 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside and 740 x 250 x 290 mm inside, in mesh and solid versions. Mesh where you want to see the level and let air through, solid where dust, swarf or small parts falling out would be a problem. Placed on a lower beam directly under the pick face they make replenishment a lift rather than a walk; placed in a separate bulk aisle they hold a much larger quantity in a countable, addressable unit instead of a loose heap on a pallet. There is more detail on the ALKON Mammoth bins for bulk and reserve stock.
The replenishment trigger has to be physical, or it will not happen. The three that actually work in Indian stores are a marked minimum line inside the bin, an empty-bin signal where the emptied front bin of a two-bin pair is itself the request, and a scan on pull where the system raises the task. Whichever you choose, it must be visible to the person who is already standing at the face. A replenishment report printed in an office at 9 am for a bin that ran dry at 4 pm yesterday is not a system; it is a written record of a stock-out that has already happened and already cost you a line stoppage.
Damage, failure modes and rack protection
Bins fail in predictable ways, and almost none of them are moulding faults. The common ones are dragging a loaded bin across a cut shelf edge until the base wears through, dropping a full bin from above shoulder height, loading a bin far past what its size was intended for so that the hanging lip deforms, splashing solvents or thinners into a bin which then goes brittle at the stress points, and long exposure to direct sunlight through a skylight or an open shutter. Whitened stress lines at the corners and along the lip are the early warning; a bin showing them will crack, usually while somebody is carrying it full.
Racking fails differently, and more dangerously. Uprights get hit at the aisle end by pallet trucks, hand trolleys and reversing stackers, and a bent upright is a structural problem rather than a cosmetic one. Visipro rack protectors fit at the base of the upright and take that impact instead of the steel, which is a far cheaper trade than replacing a frame or, worse, dealing with what a compromised upright does under a loaded beam. If your aisle ends already show scraped paint and dented feet, that is not wear — that is a record of impacts which will continue at the same rate next year. The range is listed at /products/visipro.
Build a five-minute inspection into an existing routine rather than creating a new one; the cycle counter is already walking the aisle, so hand them the checklist below. The other discipline that matters is replacement policy: replace like with like from the same range and the same size, because piecemeal replacement with whatever happens to be in the store cupboard breaks the face grid, and a face grid with three odd bins in it stops being scannable at a glance. That is exactly when picking errors start creeping back in a few months after a good reslot, and the reslot gets blamed for it.
- Cracks or stress whitening at bin corners and along the hanging lip.
- Bins no longer sitting square on the rail or louvre panel.
- Base wear from dragging across a shelf edge — deburr or cap the edge, not just replace the bin.
- Labels missing, taped over, or contradicting the shelf-edge location code.
- Upright feet at aisle ends: paint scrapes, dents, protectors missing or displaced.
- Bins loaded past the point where one hand can lift them off the face safely.
Heat, ESD, washdown and food contact
The stated service range for these bins is -10°C to +70°C, and the number to check is not the aisle temperature but the temperature where the bin actually lives. Under a metal roof in a Gujarat or Tamil Nadu summer, the top rack level and a mezzanine ceiling space run far hotter than the floor. Similarly, bins used at a wash bay, near a curing oven or beside an induction heating station see local conditions well above the ambient reading somebody took at the door. On the cold side, cold-store anterooms and chilled dispatch bays are usually within range, but these bins are not intended for steam sterilisation or autoclave cycles.
Electronics assembly needs a separate decision. Standard polypropylene bins are insulative, and inside an electrostatic protected area an insulative container sitting next to an unprotected board is a risk regardless of how careful the operator is. ALKON's ESD and conductive safe products exist for exactly this, and they are listed at /products/esd-safe-products. The practical rule for EMS and PCB assembly units around Bengaluru, Noida and Chennai is a hard boundary: standard bins may be used for mechanical hardware and packaging outside the EPA, and only ESD-range containers cross the line into it. Mixing the two inside an EPA quietly defeats every other control you have paid for.
Because the material is polypropylene copolymer with food-safe and recyclable marks and resin code 05, cleaning is straightforward and worth scheduling rather than leaving to chance. Warm water with a mild detergent handles oil and general soiling; let bins dry fully before restocking, because a damp bin under a plated component is a rust source you will end up blaming on your supplier. Avoid strong solvents, and never put components straight out of a hot washer or oven into a bin. At end of life, the resin code makes the bin identifiable for recycling rather than mixed waste, which is increasingly what a plant's own segregation policy demands.
Buying and standardising warehouse bins in India
The single most valuable procurement decision is standardisation. Pick a ladder of three to five sizes, give each one an internal part number in your own ERP, and make it the default across every plant and depot. Standardisation makes replacements a re-order rather than a project, keeps the face grid consistent so that a picker moved from a Pune plant to a Nashik plant reads the shelf the same way on day one, and lets a reslot shuffle bins between sites instead of raising a fresh purchase. Sites that skip this end up with nine sizes from four vintages and no ability to move a bin from one rack to another.
Quantify the order in face metres and shelf levels, not in bins. Measure the running metres of usable shelf face by level, divide by the outside width of the chosen bin, and you have the count for a full face; then add a working spare of around ten to fifteen per cent for growth, breakage and the bins that are permanently out at the line. Before committing to that quantity, take a sample of each candidate size, slot twenty real SKUs into them and time a normal picking round. Half an hour of that trial finds specification errors no dimension table will — usually a part that only fits diagonally, or a face height wrong for a gloved hand.
Supply matters as much as specification, because a picking face with three empty positions is a picking face that starts collecting loose parts on the shelf. Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. holds the ALKON range as an authorised stockist from Sector 17, Vashi, which puts stock within easy reach of the Navi Mumbai, Bhiwandi, Taloja and Pune corridors and on a straightforward despatch route to Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Delhi NCR and the eastern markets. Catalogue and dimension sheets are on /downloads, sector notes on /industries, and enquiries go to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com or 93266 29967 / 98201 01937, Monday to Saturday, 10:00 to 19:00.
Frequently asked questions
What size warehouse storage bin should I start with for a general spares store?
Start from your parts, not from a size. Take your top 200 pick lines, measure the largest item in each family and the quantity you want on the face between refills, then match against inside dimensions — Supra SB 1 is 117 x 80 x 52 mm inside, Bull Bin 5 is 145 x 86 x 66 mm, Panda Shelf Bin 301 is 293 x 86 x 55 mm. Most general spares stores settle on three or four sizes covering small fasteners, medium hardware and a deep shelf bin for longer items, with tote bins for anything that travels.
Should picking bins go on pallet racking or on separate shelving?
If you already have pallet racking and the slotting is still likely to change, louvre panels and rails fixed to the existing uprights are usually the faster and cheaper route, and rail-mounted bins can be repositioned by hand when the reslot happens. If the store is small-parts dominated with thousands of low-velocity part numbers and a settled layout, purpose-built Panda shelving units in the ASU series are better, because the shelf pitch and the shelf bin depth are designed to agree instead of leaving dead space at every level.
How many bin faces fit on a running metre of shelf?
Divide one metre by the outside width of the bin. A Supra SB 1 is 100 mm wide, giving about ten faces per running metre; a Bull Bin 5 at 102 mm gives about nine. This is the number that actually constrains most stores — when a team says it has run out of space, what has usually run out is face metres in the golden zone, not cubic metres in the shed. Panda shelf bins are deliberately narrow and deep, at 100 mm wide and 315 mm long, so they buy quantity without spending face width.
Are these bins suitable for hot areas, mezzanines or outdoor yards?
The stated service range is -10°C to +70°C, and the temperature to check is where the bin actually sits rather than the aisle reading. Under a metal roof in an Ahmedabad or Chennai summer, top rack levels and mezzanine ceiling spaces run considerably hotter than floor level, and the same applies near ovens, curing stations and wash bays. For genuinely outdoor use, the bigger practical issue is prolonged direct sunlight and rain ingress, so covered storage is preferable even where the temperature itself is within range.
What is the real difference between tilt bins and open-front bins for picking?
An open-front bin such as a Supra, Bull or Rhino Tuff presents a cut-away face at the front and the picker reaches in horizontally. A Roo tilt bin pivots forward so the mouth faces up and toward the picker, and the contents present themselves without any reaching. Tilt bins are excellent for loose small items at a bench — fasteners, clips, terminals — and less suitable where contents must stay clean, must not spill when the unit is knocked, or where the same face has to hold larger and irregular items.
Can these bins be used inside an ESD-controlled electronics assembly area?
Standard polypropylene bins are insulative and should not go inside an electrostatic protected area, no matter how carefully they are handled. ALKON's ESD and conductive safe products exist specifically for that requirement. The workable rule for an EMS or PCB assembly unit is a hard boundary: standard bins carry mechanical hardware, packaging and consumables outside the EPA, and only ESD-range containers cross into it. Mixing the two inside the protected area removes the benefit of every other control you have put in place.
How do I stop bins and racking getting damaged at aisle ends?
Aisle-end damage is almost always impact from pallet trucks, hand trolleys and reversing stackers, and it shows first as scraped paint and dented upright feet. Visipro rack protectors fit at the base of the upright and absorb that impact instead of the frame, which is a far cheaper trade than replacing a damaged upright or dealing with a compromised frame under load. On the bin side, keep the outermost bin position at aisle ends for slow movers, and check hanging lips and corners for stress whitening during your cycle count walk.
Do you supply outside Navi Mumbai and Maharashtra?
Yes. Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. works from Shop-1, Gagangiri CHS, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai, which serves the Navi Mumbai, Bhiwandi, Taloja, Pune and Nashik belt directly and despatches to Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Delhi NCR and eastern India. Send your requirement, ideally with the shelf face dimensions and the largest part per family, to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com or call 93266 29967 or 98201 01937 between 10:00 and 19:00, Monday to Saturday.
Are transparent bins worth choosing over solid ones?
They are worth it wherever the count or the fill level is checked visually rather than piece by piece. The transparent T versions of the Panda shelf bins let a supervisor read the level from the aisle without pulling the bin, which matters most on deep bins where stock disappears behind the front lip once the bin is a third full. Mesh Mammoth bins do the same job at bulk scale. The one discipline required is not sticking labels across the clear window, which is the commonest way sites cancel out the benefit they paid for.
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