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Here's a warehouse problem that shows up constantly: the building can technically hold more stock, but the floor plan runs out before the capacity does.

The usual answer is buying more land. The better answer is often already built into the site.

A goods lift moves pallets and crates straight up through a shaft instead of across a ramp. And ramps are expensive in ways people don't think about:

They have to slope gently enough for a forklift to climb, which eats up several times more floor space than the load itself needs

That footprint repeats on every floor a ramp passes through, not just the ground floor

A lift shaft, by contrast, holds the same small footprint on every level it serves

Industrial construction in India runs ₹800 to over ₹2,000 per square foot in 2026. A lift doesn't shrink that number, but it stretches the floor area you're already paying for a lot further. And retrofitting one into an existing building is usually faster than a horizontal extension, since there's no new foundation or roofing involved.

We build goods lifts at Technovision Engineers Pvt Ltd in Pune, supplying across Maharashtra and India.

Contact us to know more: Phone: +91 7774020056 | Website: www.technovisionengrs.com | Email: [email protected]

Some material handling problems solve themselves once you stop trying to power them.

A linear gravity chute is a sloped channel that moves cartons or bins from one floor to another using nothing but the angle of the slope and the weight of the load. That's it. No motor, no drive, no control panel.

What that gets you:

No electrical installation or drive maintenance to budget for

Fewer moving parts to service over the years

Keeps running during a power cut, when everything else on the floor stops

A compact footprint that fits into layouts where every metre of floor is already spoken for

Standard carton loads of 25 to 40 kg move through comfortably, and the exact capacity depends on carton size, surface, and the angle the chute is built at.

Inefficient Product Handling due to Generic Chute Design

We don't build these off a single template either. Width, length, height, flow direction, load capacity, and surface finish get specified around the actual product moving through the chute, because a width that's fine for cardboard can beat up something fragile on the same run.

Brands including Nilkamal, Amazon, Craftsman, and Godrej run gravity chutes we've built.

Contact us to learn more: Phone: +91 7774020056  | Website: www.technovisionengrs.com | Email: [email protected]

Every facility storing components in batches hits this eventually. Newer stock stays easy to reach and gets picked first. Older stock drifts back, gets forgotten, and shows up months later either wasted or held up in a quality check.

A FIFO trolley removes the problem by design.

Wheeled, gravity-fed, loads in one side, comes out the other in the exact order it went in. No operator decision to get wrong, because there's no decision to make. Noticeboards rely on memory. This doesn't.

Runs on castors too, so it moves to a workbench or line and repositions when the job changes.

Works alongside:

kanban bins

flow racks

point-of-use feeding stations

Same logic shows up in kitting trolleys — pulling components together for assembly only works if none of them are picked out of order. Some setups add dunnage, custom inserts that hold each part in place during transit and keep kits organised at the pick point.

Most warehouses only take rotation seriously after it costs them: an expired batch, a client complaint, an audit catch. Equipment that enforces FIFO physically catches it before that point.

Technovision Engineers Pvt Ltd builds FIFO and kitting trolleys in Pune, specified to your load and layout, not off-the-shelf.

Here's something most production floors don't think about until it's already a problem: the conveyors and presses get all the engineering attention. The table where someone actually sits and assembles the product? Usually an afterthought.

A fixed steel table is built once, for one product. Then the line changes, the SKU shifts, and suddenly operators are reaching too far, working at the wrong height, adjusting themselves around a layout that was never built for the job they're doing now.

That's exactly what a pipe and joint assembly table fixes.

Instead of welded steel, it's built from modular pipe and joint components. Add a shelf. Extend the length. Drop in a new tool holder. Reconfigure the whole thing. No rebuilding required.

Welded tables hold their shape. Modular ones hold your production schedule together.

A couple of related setups worth knowing:

ESD workbenches — for PCB assembly and electronics testing, where a static charge a mechanical line would never notice can quietly ruin a sensitive component.

Lean workstations — designed around the actual sequence of the task, so tool holders and shelves sit exactly where an operator's hands and eyes naturally go.

Automotive plants, electronics units, tool rooms, warehouses — different pressures, same underlying need: a table built around the work, not the other way around.

Technovision Engineers Pvt Ltd has been building material handling and workstation solutions in Pune since 1998, ISO 9001:2015 certified.

Here's a pattern that shows up in almost every plant eventually: production needs change, a new SKU comes in, a line gets reshuffled, and the rack or workstation that was built for the old layout doesn't fit anymore. If it's welded, that's not a quick fix. It's cutting, grinding, and rebuilding, with a fabricator on site and your floor partially down while it happens.

A coated pipe and joint system solves that specific problem, the components assemble and disassemble without welding at all.

The pipe itself

It's built from CRFH (Cold Rolled Full Hard) ERW steel, cold-rolled for high load-bearing strength without extra wall thickness or weight. A bonded coating protects the outer surface from rust and scuffing, and the inner surface is treated too, so it's protected inside and out, not just where you'd notice it. One real limit: keep it away from solvents and oils, the coating isn't rated for direct contact with either.

What changes on your floor

Since there's no welding involved, your own team can reconfigure a rack, trolley, or workstation in-house. No fabrication vendor, no waiting on their schedule, no shutting the line down. For plants running 5S, Kaizen, or Just-in-Time, or handling frequent SKU changes, that turns what used to be a vendor visit and a day of downtime into a few hours of internal labor.

Options available

Five steel thicknesses, 0.8mm through 2mm, and six colours (ivory, black, grey, green, blue, red) so new structures can match your existing floor colour-coding instead of standing out. Thickness depends on load and support span; that's worth confirming with us before you order, not after.

Where it's built and who's using it

We've supplied pipe and joint systems to automotive, electronics, warehousing, and pharmaceutical plants across India since 1998, including Tata Motors, Hyundai Motors, Royal Enfield, and Panasonic. Manufacturing and dispatch both happen from our ISO 9001:2015 certified facility in Pune, Maharashtra.

Warehouses adding a mezzanine level run into the same question every time: how do you move cartons from the new level down to dispatch? The usual fix is a motorized conveyor. Wiring, a drive unit, a control panel to keep running.

For pure downward movement, that's often more system than the job needs. A spiral gravity conveyor does the same job with no motor at all.

The mechanics of it

It's a spiral chute. Cartons or bins go in at the top, ride the spiral track down, and come out at the bottom. Speed depends on the spiral's angle and the roller or skatewheel surface, nothing electronic controls it.

No drive means no drive failure. No control panel means no programming and no downtime from a faulty one. No power draw means one less thing pulling from a connection that's probably already loaded up with other equipment.

Where it fits

Downward-only movement is the use case. Storage to dispatch, upper floor to a packing line below, that kind of thing. If the material needs to travel upward, or you need tight control over spacing and timing, gravity alone won't cover it, and that's a different type of system.

Built around the site, not a catalog spec

We build our spiral gravity conveyors in mild steel, sized to your actual floor heights, spiral diameter, chute width, and load capacity. The compact footprint helps most in buildings that weren't originally laid out with a conveyor run in mind.

We've been fabricating material handling equipment since 1998, ISO 9001:2015 certified, working across India from our base in Pune. If you're planning a layout that needs downward movement between floors, we can go through your floor plan and load numbers with you.

So here's a thing I didn't expect to find interesting about my job: FIFO racks. Specifically, the ones that don't get welded.

Turns out most FIFO racks in factories are welded steel — which sounds fine until your production line changes (which it always does, like, constantly), and now you're stuck with a rack shape that doesn't match your process anymore. New SKU needs a narrower lane? tough, that's a fabrication job. Safety audit wants bracing added? another fabrication job. Line moves six feet? You get it.

the version we build instead uses pipe and joint fittings — Goblin Pipes, ABS-coated so they don't corrode on a factory floor, connected without any welding. so if the layout needs to change, someone on the maintenance team just... changes it. same week. no vendor callback, no waiting on steel.

What I like about it is that it's not a trade-off — it's still rated for industrial loads; lane width and shelf spacing, and pipe grade all get factored into the capacity. The structure can move when your process drather thanad of the other way around.

If you're setting up a new warehouse or dark store and floor space is tight, this question comes up almost every time: can you put the lift outside, right in the open, instead of walling off a separate room for it?

Yes, you can. But an outdoor industrial lift isn't an indoor unit that just happens to sit under the sky. We design it for that exposure from the first drawing. The coating, the structure covering, sometimes even the foundation all get planned around your site conditions before fabrication starts, not patched in after the build is already underway.

What Indian weather actually does to a lift outdoors

Less than most people expect, honestly. Clients usually picture freezing or snow load when they ask about weatherproofing, but that's not what a VRC installed across most of India deals with. What it deals with is sun that fades and weakens ordinary paint, monsoon rain that finds its way into every seam, and humidity that sits in the air for months, working on any untreated metal the whole time. We handle all three with epoxy paint plus a separately precoated structure sheet. That combination is what gets an outdoor unit through a full Indian summer and monsoon without needing anything more elaborate.

Indoor vs outdoor: the finish is genuinely different

Indoor VRC gets a quick-dry (QD) paint finish. That's enough, since there's no real moisture exposure behind four walls.

Outdoor VRC gets epoxy paint plus a separately precoated structure sheet, two distinct specs working together as layered protection.

If a vendor ever quotes you the same finish for both, ask why. It's rare to see identical treatment hold up across two environments with such different demands.

Foundation and inspection stay the same

Pit-style and ramp-style foundations both work fine outdoors. What decides which one you need is your building layout and access points, indoors or out. Inspection schedule doesn't change either. No separate maintenance calendar just because the unit's in the open.

The detail teams almost always miss: ceiling height

Outdoor units need noticeably more clearance than indoor ones, because of the added structure and canopy protecting them. We installed a four-post VRC for a sheet metal components client on this basis: G+1 configuration, 2700 kg capacity, 3m x 3m carriage, running at 6 meters a minute. The GA drawing called for a minimum height of 12.8 meters just to clear the outer structure and canopy. We confirmed that number with the client before finalizing the design, because catching it late means redesigning the whole layout right before launch, with no time or budget left to absorb it.

Why this belongs in your layout decision, not your punch list

For a warehouse manager chasing throughput targets, or a plant head signing off on capex, the real question was never whether a lift can survive outdoors. It can, when it's engineered for it from the start. The risk is treating outdoor placement as a minor site detail instead of a design decision that needs to be locked in before drawings are finalized. That's exactly where floor bottlenecks, delayed go-live dates, and unplanned civil work come from.

If you're working through a site layout and need to confirm what an outdoor install would take on your floor, reach out. We're happy to walk through it with you.

📞 +91 7774020056 🌐 www.technovisionengrs.com

Quick truth:

VRC (Vertical Reciprocating Conveyor) = goods only, no people.

Freight Elevator = goods + people, licensed under IS 17900 and State Lift Acts.

💰 Cost Snapshot

VRC: ₹8–15 lakh purchase + ₹2–5 lakh install.

Freight Elevator: ₹40–80 lakh purchase + ₹15–30 lakh install.

5‑year total: VRC ₹14–27 lakh vs. Freight Elevator ₹73–146 lakh. 👉 VRC is ~80% cheaper overall.

⚖️ Compliance

VRC: Built to ASME conveyor standards. No dedicated Indian code. No lift license.

Freight Elevator: Strictly regulated. Annual inspection + license renewal under State Lift Acts.

🔧 Maintenance

VRC: Authorized staff only. Lower compliance burden.

Freight Elevator: Heavy compliance. Frequent inspections. An authorised inspector is required before the restart.

🏗️ Installation

VRC: 4–6 weeks. No municipal board approvals.

Freight Elevator: 10–12 weeks. Mandatory approvals.

❓ FAQs

Can people ride a VRC? No. Goods only.

Which is cheaper? VRC, by a wide margin.

Which needs more inspection? Freight Elevator.

Which fits mezzanines or tight spaces? VRC.

🏭 Decision Guide

Goods only → VRC

Goods + people → Freight Elevator

Want control in‑house → VRC

Okay with licensing + inspector dependency → Freight Elevator

the machine that moved those groceries between floors at 2am.

it's called a VRC lift. vertical reciprocating conveyor. basically a platform that goes up, comes down, carries stuff between floors. that's it. no operator needed. no elevator licence. no pit dug into the floor.

a freight elevator doing the same job costs Rs 25 to 60 lakh. needs a machine room, needs civil work, needs a licensed operator on standby.

a VRC? Rs 5 to 12 lakh. installed in 2 days. runs for 20 years.

blinkit crossed 2,100 dark stores this year. zepto has 1,000+. every single multi-level one has a VRC moving goods while you're asleep placing that order.

i work in material handling in pune and honestly... this equipment gets zero credit for keeping quick commerce alive.

just thought someone should say it.