Racking Impact Sensors & Continuous Monitoring

Why continuous monitoring changes racking safety

A weekly PRRS walk-round and an annual expert inspection tell you what your racking looks like on the day it is checked. They cannot tell you that a reach truck clipped a frame at 11pm on a Tuesday, or that the same bay has been struck four times this month. Impact monitoring closes that gap by watching the racking continuously between inspections.

Rackstor supplies, installs and manages the whole system under our own name — survey, installation, alerting and ongoing support all come from us, so you have one point of contact and one accountable partner for the safety of your racking.

How it works

We start with a site survey. We walk the warehouse with you, look at racking layout, aisle traffic, MHE types and the areas where damage keeps recurring, and from that we determine how many sensors are needed and how many gateways are required to give reliable coverage across the building.

Sensors are then fitted directly to racking uprights. Installation is quick and non-disruptive: a recent 48-sensor installation with a single gateway, in a bonded warehouse close to Heathrow, was completed in under two hours without stopping operations.

From the moment the system goes live it monitors 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Every impact is graded on a traffic-light scale — green for a minor contact, amber for something that needs a look, red for an impact serious enough to warrant stopping and unloading the bay — and management is alerted immediately. The dashboard shows where the impact happened, when, how severe it was, and which zone or floor-plan location it maps to, so the response is targeted rather than a hunt down the aisles.

Case study: five months of monitoring in a bonded warehouse

A UK logistics and warehousing operator piloted the system across a bonded warehouse to test whether continuous monitoring would genuinely reduce racking damage. Results were tracked over five months of live monitoring.

Critical incidents fell by 88%, severe incidents by 70%, and high severity incidents by 50% across the monitoring period. The reduction came largely from behaviour: once drivers knew impacts were recorded and attributable to a location and time, the way MHE was driven around the racking changed.

The data also exposed a reporting problem management had suspected but could not prove. Night-shift impacts were being reported far less often by drivers than day-shift impacts, despite the sensors recording comparable activity. In one case the system flagged a forklift striking a rack hard enough to trigger several sensors at once — an incident nobody had reported, which was subsequently confirmed on CCTV using the exact timestamp from the dashboard.

What operators get out of it

Proactive 24/7/365 monitoring instead of a snapshot at inspection time. Measurable improvement in driver behaviour and MHE performance as the data builds. A decreased risk of injury to personnel working in and around the racking.

Commercially, the same data reduces the risk of inventory damage, reduces the risk of a racking failure or collapse, and cuts repair and replacement spend by catching damage at the point it happens rather than after a run has been progressively weakened.

Monitoring is not a replacement for your statutory duties — you still need weekly PRRS checks and an annual expert inspection under HSG76 and BS EN 15635. It sits alongside them, and the incident history it produces makes both far more useful.

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