Interworld Freight improves inventory control with pallet rack

From explosives to soy sauce, you can find a plethora of products stored inside the warehouse of Miami-based freight forwarding company Interworld Freight. Only a few years after establishing the company, Interworld Freight’s founder, John Crespo, moved operations from Colombia to the United States.

Without knowing how to speak English, Crespo began serving Colombia by arranging mainly air freight from an 800-square-foot warehouse in Miami. Today, the company handles 7,000 to 8,000 containers per year, mostly bound for any of some 13 destinations in Central and South America. The company currently employs more than 50 people in their 30,000-square-foot warehouse.

As Interworld Freight rapidly grew, its warehouse had a time crunch, mainly due to the increase in freight it was receiving. “We started having very critical space issues,” says Farouk Gomati, vice president of the company. “You would go out to the warehouse, and you literally couldn’t walk in the warehouse because it was just full of freight.”

At one point, the situation became so bad that warehouse personnel had to stop using four of the company’s six forklifts, as there was no room to operate them. At the time, warehouse personnel were using a lot of floor space because there were only a few pallet racks in place—with 50 to 100 pallet positions at most.

Due to the variety and high rotation of products inside the warehouse, Interworld Freight decided to purchase a pallet rack. With 1,346 pallet positions, the rack provides immediate access to every stored load, while also enhancing space utilization, improving inventory controls and reducing damage. In addition, Interworld Freight also selected the storage company’s push-back system, which considerably increased its warehouse’s capacity by 35% to 38%.

And, since every pallet now has a position on the pallet rack, costly errors have also declined. “My mistake or error percentage dropped so much after the whole project,” Gomati adds.

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