A mezzanine floor needs to be accessible and easy to use to benefit your business. Staff should find it easy to load and unload inventory, move displays into position or get bulky items onto your floor.
In a busy warehouse or retail environment, a mezzanine floor must accommodate efficient material handling processes and minimise transit times by eliminating bottlenecks wherever possible. Mezzanine pallet safety gates and mezzanine staircases are viable options. Still, these commonplace solutions fall if staff aren’t physically capable of carrying inventory from A to B or you need to move large amounts of stock on and off your floor relatively quickly.
Mezzanine stairs and pallet gates may not be viable, especially for disabled and ambulant users. A growing percentage of new floors are installed with a dedicated mezzanine lift – designed to optimise the movement of people and goods in line with your current operational processes.
Here at USS, we design and manufacture mezzanine lift shafts for industrial, retail and commercial floors. We have over 45 years of experience in mezzanine lift shaft design. We have worked with a host of household names to build goods and personnel lifts for various mezzanine floors – including multi-storey floors in busy distribution centres and public-facing floors in high-street retail environments.
To be clear, we don’t design or manufacture lift cabs, rails or mechanical elements of a mezzanine lift. Our specialism is in the design and fabrication of structural elements. Still, our longstanding industry experience has allowed us to build close working relationships with a number of subcontractors and lift vendors.
If you are in the market for a mezzanine floor and you think you’d like the finished article to include a lift, we’d encourage you to get in touch with a member of our design team at your earliest convenience.
We’ll be able to talk you through the finer points of mezzanine floor design; interrogate your plans, and come up with a solution that facilitates the easy movement of goods and inventory, supports your staff and minimises wasted space. We’ll also be able to help you manage the procurement and installation process, organise inspections and help ensure that your lift is fully operational before you sign off on your new floor.
As with all of our mezzanine floor services, the focus is on providing a turnkey solution that takes the hard work and hassles out of expanding your premises and improving the efficiency of your business.
Well-Designed Lifts For Modern Businesses
Lift shaft placement and design are often overlooked aspects of the overarching design process but can profoundly affect how your floor functions. Ideally, you want to ensure that your lift shaft is positioned for easy access while minimising the overall footprint to ensure that you can maximise the available storage/display space provided by your new mezzanine.
The last thing you want is an awkwardly-placed mezzanine lift shaft that forces employees to manoeuvre heavy pallets around the rest of your support columns or travel further than strictly necessary to stow inventory.
Lift shafts can also be supporting elements in their own right. It often helps to cut costs if they’re positioned in a way that allows you to eliminate a few supporting columns. However, you may not want to position your new lift shaft at the centre of your mezzanine, where it’ll disrupt the layout of your racking/displays or force people to mill about in space that could serve a lot more practical purpose.
Carefully weighing up and balancing these contradictory concerns is part and parcel of the in-depth design process we provide. Irrespective of whether you’re trying to add a trio of goods lifts to a multi-tier mezzanine or a personnel lift to serve the office space you're adding to your new floor.
In a recent project for Readie Construction Ltd, we built a three-tier mezzanine floor with two multi-level staircases and a twin goods lift – designed to make it easy for the third-party companies renting the space to move goods between various ‘workshop’ spaces.
