Pictured above: a V3000 racking run along a workshop wall from our project archive (V3-5), orange beams on blue uprights with stock on the lower levels and a yellow aisle line on the floor. Every run like this has a person who walks past it daily, and usually nobody whose job it is to look at it.

Ask who is responsible for the racking in a warehouse and you tend to get one of three answers. "The warehouse manager." "Facilities." Or, after a pause, "the people who installed it." All three can be partly true, and that is the problem: when a job belongs to three people it belongs to nobody, and racking is a structure that gets hit for a living. The bent upright that has been there since March, the load notice that fell off, the safety pin that went missing: each is one person assuming another person has it.

This is not a legal article, and we are not advising on what the law requires of your company. For that, ask your own safety officer. It is a practical one: what a named racking owner actually does in a year, what you can hand to a contractor, and what you cannot.

Why racking falls between the chairs

A forklift driver sees the damage first and rarely thinks it is theirs to report. A warehouse manager sees stock levels, not steel. Facilities looks after the building, and racking feels like equipment. The installer left, with the handover documents if you were lucky, and nobody has called them since. Add a change of tenant, a change of manager, or a landlord who inherited the racking from the last occupier, and the paper trail goes with them. We wrote about the last case in taking over a warehouse with racking already in it.

The result is predictable. Damage is discovered by an inspection weeks later, or by nobody. Loads creep up because the load notice is gone. Pins and clips are missing because nobody counts them. None of it needs special skill to prevent. It needs one name against it.

What a racking owner actually owns

It is a small job, not a full-time one. Done properly it is these seven things.

1. The impact log. A forklift strike gets reported to this person on the day, with a photograph and the bay location, and nobody is blamed for reporting it. We have said before that drivers who report an impact without expecting to be blamed are worth more than any guard, because an unreported strike only surfaces when someone else trips over it. The log is also how you spot the same bay being hit three times, which is a layout problem and not a driver problem; see the patterns forklift damage falls into.
2. The decision to unload. When an upright is bowed or a beam has stayed deformed, someone has to be able to say "empty that bay and the ones either side" without asking permission from three people. That authority has to be written down in advance. The reasoning is in a bent racking upright: repair, replace or de-rate.
3. The inspection diary. Under SS EN 15635 principles, racking is inspected annually and after an impact. The owner holds the date of the last inspection, books the next one, and keeps the report. If you do not know when your racking was last inspected, that date is the first thing to find out.
4. The load notices. Each run should carry a notice that says what it can hold, and when a run is de-rated or a beam level moved, the notice is reissued to match. A run with no load notice is itself a finding on our inspection reports. Detail in rack load notices: the sign your warehouse is probably missing.
5. The paperwork. The installer's handover documents, the layout drawing, previous inspection reports, the record of what was repaired and when. All of it in one place that survives the owner leaving. See the racking paperwork nobody keeps until somebody asks for it and what your installer should give you.
6. The driver briefing. After an inspection, the people on the trucks need to know what is tagged, what is out of service and what changed. A report in a drawer protects nobody. We set out how in how to brief forklift drivers after a rack inspection.
7. Changes to the stock or the trucks. A heavier pallet, a different pallet size or a new reach truck changes what the racking is being asked to do. The owner is the person who hears about it before it happens, not after. Our own advice on the truck side is in checking a new forklift against your racking.

The five-minute walk

None of this replaces an inspection, but a short walk by the same person at the same time each week catches the things inspections only find once a year. We would suggest looking for four things: uprights at the lower levels where trucks strike, sighted along the run from the aisle end rather than face-on, because a bend reads as a deviation from the line; safety pins and locking clips, which are commonly missing; beams that no longer sit level; and any new stock on a level that has no load notice. Write down anything you find. Photograph it with the date.

This is our suggestion, not a requirement, and it is only worth doing if what you find goes into the impact log and gets acted on. An unread log is worse than none, because it records that you knew.

What you can hand to a contractor, and what you cannot

You can hand over the specialist work. Our inspection looks at every upright frame for plumbness, impact damage, missing safety pins, beam deflection and base-plate fixings, and it ends with a written green, amber and red report with a remediation estimate. Amber, in our report, means remediation within six months; red means the bay is unloaded now. Because we fabricate racking ourselves, we can also carry out the repair, and replacement parts can be matched to your existing system. Wong Lye has built racking since 2014, and our first racks went into our own logistics operation.

What you cannot hand over is the ownership. We can tell you that a bay is red. We cannot be in your warehouse on the Tuesday a driver clips a leg and says nothing. Someone on your side has to hear about it, close the bay and call us. A warranty will not step in either: forklift impact is accidental damage rather than a defect, and our own warranty excludes it, as covered in racking warranty: what it covers and what it never will.

What an inspection costs the owner

The cost of the visit is small next to the cost of a bay coming down. We publish our typical rate: S$3.50 to S$6.00 per upright frame for an SS EN 15635 inspection, with a S$1,200 minimum per site visit, with repairs quoted separately after the report. For a small warehouse the minimum is what you pay, so a whole-site inspection costs the same as a partial one. The working is in how much a rack inspection costs in Singapore. Those figures are typical, not a quotation.

The handover note for when the owner leaves

The weak point in every system like this is the day the named person moves on. Write one page that says: who the owner is now, where the inspection reports and handover documents live, the date of the last and next inspection, the open items on the impact log, and who to call. Put the same page in the file of whoever takes over the role. If an insurer asks what you do about racking, that page and the records behind it are most of your answer; see what insurers actually ask for.

Where to start this week

• Write one name against the racking, and tell the drivers who it is.
• Find the date of the last inspection and the last report. If neither exists, book an inspection.
• Walk the runs once and check that each one has a load notice.
• Start the impact log, with a rule that reporting a strike is never held against the driver.
• Write the one-page handover note.

If you would like us to inspect the racking and tell you in writing what is green, amber and red, message us on WhatsApp, or read the rack inspection page for what the service covers.