Sloping shelves are superior to flat shelves

Pharmacist Brendan O'Loughlin with the sloping shelves of StockFlow and Rombic in his dispensary

Sloping shelves that can be filled from the back have been timed to take 5.0 seconds per item to fill. The ease of filling occurs because sloping shelves gravity feed items to the front of the shelf, thus creating space at the back into which new items can be placed.

To put items away on flat shelves involves far more workflows.

• Firstly, the old stock has to be removed from the back of the shelf and placed in a "holding bay", usually on the dispensary bench.
• Then the new items are placed at the back of the shelf.
• Finally the old items are taken from the "holding bay" and placed at the front of the shelf in front of the new items.

This three step workflow has been timed at 9.6 seconds per item.

Thus, when putting items away by back filling sloping shelves, 4.6 seconds per item is saved compared to flat shelves. In a pharmacy dispensing 300 prescriptions per day, back filling sloping shelves saves 23 minutes per day.

Research of our RoboPharma automated dispensing machine reveals that putting away stock is reduced to only 2.7 seconds per item. In a pharmacy dispensing 300 prescriptions per day the savings would be 31 minutes per day.

Diagrams of flat and sloping shelves

DIAGRAM 1 Flat shelves hinder vision of products and accessibility to them

DIAGRAM 2 Sloping shelves make products more easily visible and easier to access

Sloping shelves have additional advantages over flat shelves.

• With sloping shelves, via gravity, items feed to the front of the shelves and are easier to see and select.
• With flat shelves the next item to be selected is progressively further to the back of the shelf and is harder to see and select. Diagrams 1 & 2 illustrate the difference.

Sloping shelves or sloping drawers, via gravity, feed the oldest product to the front. This means that the oldest item is always the first item selected. Sloping shelves thus automatically date rotate stock. Selecting the oldest item is simply a matter of taking the item at the front of the shelf. In a flat drawer if there are two or more items of a product in stock it is not easy to determine which is the oldest product, without checking the dating on all products.

Traditionally flat shelves do not have dividers. Products can move about the shelves getting out of line and increasing the risk of selection error. Sloping shelves have dividers that create specific compartments for each product. These compartments mean products do not get out of line, are easier to put away, and easier to select.

Sloping shelves save time, make dispensing easier, and automatically date rotate the stock, and are therefor superior to flat shelves.

All three Sintek® stock storage systems, and the automated RoboPharma® system, have sloping shelves.

The above information was published in the Australian Journal of Pharmacy, Vol 90, September 2009, p49