Pictured above: a heavy-duty racking run from our project archive (V3-5), with the aisle line marked on the floor in front of it. Every beam level in this photo is a set of storage locations. Whether anyone can find them later depends on a decision usually made after we leave.

A racking layout gets a great deal of attention: pallet positions, aisle widths, beam loads, how the forklift turns. Then the racking goes up, stock goes in, and the question nobody planned for arrives on week two — where exactly is that pallet?

In a small operation the answer lives in someone's head, and that works until the day that person is on leave. Above a certain size, or the moment you put a scanner in anyone's hand, the warehouse needs addresses: a name for every storage location, marked on the steel, that both a person and a system can read. It costs very little and it is easiest to do before the first pallet goes in.

What an address is made of

Almost every workable scheme in a warehouse is some version of four parts:

• Aisle — usually a letter, A, B, C, running in a fixed direction across the warehouse.
• Bay — the section between two upright frames, numbered along the run from a fixed starting end.
• Level — the beam level, numbered from the floor up.
• Position — which pallet within the bay, from a fixed side.

So B-12-03-2 is aisle B, twelfth bay, third level, second position. What the separator looks like matters far less than the two rules that make it work: every element is fixed-width (01, not 1, so sorting works), and every direction is decided once and written down — which end is bay 01, which way the aisle letters run, whether the floor level is 00 or 01, and which side is position 1 when you face the bay.

Those direction decisions sound trivial. They are the single most common cause of a system that half the team uses backwards.

Number for the pick path, not for the plan view

There is a real choice here. Numbering both sides of an aisle in sequence as you walk down it — 01, 02, 03 on one side and continuing back on the other — produces a route with no wasted walking. Numbering each rack run independently is simpler to draw and simpler to explain to a new starter.

Neither is wrong. What matters is that the numbering matches how people actually move through your warehouse, which is why it belongs with the layout discussion rather than after it. If your aisle widths and truck routes are being planned anyway, the numbering sequence is the same conversation.

Leave gaps, or you will renumber the whole warehouse

The mistake that costs most, later, is numbering tightly. A warehouse fills up, two more bays get added on the end of a run, a new run appears in what used to be the staging area — and if every number is consecutive, the options are to renumber everything or to live with a run that goes 09, 10, 11, 47.

Two practical habits fix it: leave spare numbers at the ends of runs and spare letters between aisles, and allow alpha suffixes for a bay inserted later. This is the same reason we ask, at the survey, whether the layout has to grow — a run that is going to gain a beam level or an extra bay is designed differently from one that is final.

Where the label physically goes

Label position is a picking-speed decision, not a tidiness one.

• Ground and low levels are read by a person standing in front of them, so labels sit on the front face of the beam, under the position they describe, at a consistent height in every bay.
• High levels are read from the floor, by a forklift driver looking up. A label physically fixed at level 4 is unreadable from the ground, so high levels are usually listed on a single multi-level plate at the foot of the upright — the driver reads the plate, counts up, and places the pallet.
• Aisle-end signs tell someone which aisle they are entering without walking its length.

Fixing method matters more than people expect. Adhesive labels on powder-coated beams do come off with heat, damp and cleaning, and a magnetic label or a beam-clip holder survives a beam that gets restacked or relocated. In a cold room or chiller, treat labels as a cold-rated item along with everything else, because standard adhesive fails at those temperatures. Wherever forklift traffic clips the uprights, the label at the foot of the upright will be the first casualty.

If you are scanning

If there are scanners in the building, two more decisions follow. First, the barcode symbology and label size have to match the read distance: a code that scans fine at arm's length is not the same code as one being read from a truck several metres away, where a long-range scanner and a larger check-digit format are usually needed. Second, the human-readable text must always print alongside the barcode, in the same format as the system displays it, because on the day the scanner fails, someone is going to read it aloud.

Get the label format from whoever runs your WMS before printing anything, and print a test set to hold against the real racking at the real distance before committing to several thousand.

What a location label is not

A location label is not a load notice. The load notice is the sign that states the bay's rated load and configuration, and it is one of the things an inspector looks for during a rack inspection to SS EN 15635. Location labels can be changed by the warehouse team as the operation evolves; load notices reflect the engineering of the installed system, and they change when the system does — a beam level moved, a different beam fitted, a reconfiguration — not before.

Keep the two visually distinct. We have seen operations where a neat new label scheme was installed straight over the load notices, which removed the only on-rack record of what each bay was rated to carry.

When the layout changes

Any reconfiguration is also a relabelling job, and it is worth budgeting as one. Shifting racking inside your own factory or relocating to a new warehouse means the addresses move with the steel — and if the new layout is a different shape, the scheme itself may need rethinking rather than transplanting.

The sequence that works: agree the new layout, fix the numbering on the drawing, print the labels, install them as each run is completed, then update the system in one controlled step. Doing it the other way round — install everything, then work out the numbers — is how warehouses end up with two schemes running at once.

The short version

• Aisle, bay, level, position. Fixed-width numbers, and every direction decided once and written down.
• Number to match how people actually walk the aisles, and decide it with the layout, not after it.
• Leave spare numbers and allow suffixes, or adding two bays means renumbering a warehouse.
• Low levels get beam-face labels; high levels get a multi-level plate at the foot of the upright, readable from the floor.
• Choose the fixing for the environment: adhesive fails in cold rooms and where beams get restacked.
• If scanning, match the barcode to the read distance and always print the human-readable text.
• A location label is not a load notice, and it must never cover one.
• Every reconfiguration is a relabelling job. Fix numbers on the drawing before the labels are printed.

Planning a layout and want the numbering settled at the same time? WhatsApp us on 9107 2601 and raise it at the site survey — bay-by-bay layouts are how we work anyway, and the addressing sequence falls straight out of them. Our systems are on the pallet racking systems page and the full scope is on services.

Related reading: what a rack inspection flags · adding a beam level to existing racking · planning your first warehouse layout