The key to success at Corporate Jet Support (CJS, Moonachie, N.J.) is the company’s ability to keep in-demand high-quality airplane parts flying out the door—and doing it faster than the competition. A leading wholesale supplier of Gulfstream aircraft parts, last year, Corporate Jet’s success created a potentially debilitating problem in its storage warehouse.
Simply put, says CJS owner, Chris Breitweiser, “We ran out of room. We had grown out of our existing storage space and were forced to contemplate either moving or expanding our warehouse through expensive construction.”
The problem, as it turned out, was not one of insufficient storage space—the available 10,000 square feet was fine. The problem was a storage system that was not making the best use of the available space. CJS was relying on antiquated, conventional shelving and pallets to store its wide range of fast-moving aircraft parts. Breitweiser learned that he actually had more available storage space than he thought after talking with Bob Darienzo at Deluxe Systems of Hackensack, N.J.
The solution was a modular storage system from Lista International Corp. (Holliston, Mass.) that would take full advantage of CJS’ available, underutilized vertical space, while providing secure, dust-free, organized and highly flexible storage for the company’s entire inventory.
Finding Space
CJS purchased 250 HyperSpace (HS) cabinets, plus two Storage Wall systems from Lista. The high-density, 22.5-inch-deep HS Cabinets are designed to make item retrieval easier and reduce reach and strain, with drawers that extend completely from the housing to allow easy access to all the contents. The HS cabinets’ 18-inchdeep drawers require only 36 inches of aisle space for full drawer extension, so aisle space can be minimized.
CJS captured 10 feet of vertical space by stacking two HS cabinets. Lista custom-configured the HS drawer interiors using its flexible, modular dividing and partitioning accessories to accommodate the items CJS would be storing—everything from small washers to valves, generators and actuators. Each drawer has a 440-poundcapacity, ensuring that the contents will be fully supported.
“We were able to maximize our warehouse height and maintain the flexibility to put thousands of items in a very limited area.” says Breitweiser. “We can now hold in one drawer what we previously were storing in three units of conventional shelving. We now have 35,000 different locations in which to store inventory. With our old method, we were only able to store one-third of that amount.”
CJS utilizes the Storage Wall systems to provide a temporary home for long and bulky supplies, such as fluorescent lighting tubes. This storage wall system combines drawers, shelves and rollout trays in one space-efficient unit to deliver high cubic density and maximum versatility. CJS custom ordered its Storage Wall units without end panels, so that especially long items can be easily accessed from the open ends of boxes.
Security Concerns
“We deal in used aircraft parts for planes that are no longer being made,” says Breitweiser, “so, many of the parts are difficult to find and very valuable. It’s important to keep a close watch on inventory and to maintain a worry-free security system.”
The items stored in the Storage Wall system are less fragile and costly than those stored in the HS, so locks were not an issue. Superior organization, on the other hand, was of paramount concern.
“All the units are rock solid and easy to keep well organized,” he says. “With the combination of the different sizes of cabinets, CJS is now able to segregate different types of inventory, while maintaining plenty of room for growth in an area that we thought we had outgrown.”
“We’ve gained a number of benefits by switching to this storage system—superior organization, inventory control and fast retrieval that have made us a lot more productive.”
