ITS Rotterdam: High Racks For Timber And Building Materials

A new warehouse built by the Dutch timber and building materials merchants ITS Rotterdam enables consignment goods and stock to be centrally stored. The warehouse is equipped with 9 meter high rack systems from OHRA, enabling the realisation of 460 palette places as well as 396 meters of cantilever racks.

ITS Rotterdam is both a wholesale timber and building materials merchant as well as a building supplies store for DIY enthusiasts and tradesmen. Facilities include a carpenter’s workshop which delivers specially tailored windows, doors and frames. With this unusual combination ITS has successfully established a special market position. With the new warehouse at the company headquarters in Rotterdam order picking items and bulk goods for large volume customers which have previously been stored separately will now be centralised.

The necessary racks have been supplied by OHRA, specialist for cantilever and palette racks from Kerpen, Germany. ITS was not only convinced by the quality of the rack systems manufactured from solid-walled, hot-rolled standard structural steel. With its modular concept OHRA also offered a tailor-made solution for the storage requirements at ITS's logistics centre.


For the optimal storage of wood, boards and building materials, OHRA erected eleven 36 meter long rows with cantilever racks as well as two rows of palette racks in the space of just two months. With a rack height of 9 meters the available floor space was used to best advantage and travel routes for the 4-way forklifts were reduced. The palette racks with compartment widths of 2,700 millimetres provide a total of 462 storage positions across six levels. The cantilever racks enable palettes and long timber to be stored across nine levels. The arm lengths vary between 1,100 and 1,550 millimetres. As ITS also sells heavy hard woods, a number of rack zones have been additionally equipped as heavy load racks.

Guide rails fitted at floor level enable the 2,530 millimetre wide rack aisles to be safely operated with the narrow aisle forklifts specially manufactured by Hubtex. The first three levels of the racks are used for the storage of the order related commissioning of articles, the upper area provides space for bulk goods.

For an optimised building process OHRA initially planned the racks and the body of the building was subsequently adjusted to the rack system. This required a correspondingly high degree of precision in the assembly of the racks, however it ensured the client an optimisation of building investment costs in advance.