Operational Guide
A practical guide to what to look at during your weekly internal racking inspection, in what order, and how to record findings. Built for the PRRS or anyone tasked with carrying out internal checks between annual SARI visits.
Reading time: 10 minutes
A good weekly inspection is methodical, recorded, and not rushed. Before you begin the walk-around itself, three things make the inspection more useful and the records more defensible:
A Note On Frequency
Weekly is the typical guidance, but you can scale up or down based on use. Heavy multi-shift operations sometimes inspect twice a week or more in high-impact aisles. Quieter sites with limited activity may move to fortnightly or monthly with the agreement of their SARI. The principle is that the gap between internal inspections should be short enough to catch damage before it can cause an incident.
The weekly inspection is most useful when carried out the same way each time. We recommend working aisle by aisle, in the same direction, and within each bay starting at floor level and working upwards. That way nothing is missed and your records are directly comparable week over week.
Within each bay, work through the components in the following order. Each section below shows what to look for, and the sort of finding that should trigger logging.
A weekly inspection that isn’t recorded is, in compliance terms, an inspection that didn’t happen. The damage log is the record an HSE inspector or insurer asks for, and the document the annual SARI uses as a baseline.
For each finding, capture:
Practical Tip
A simple spreadsheet is fine if it’s used. A fancy app is fine too if it’s used. What matters is consistency: the same format every week, with each finding traceable from its first appearance through to closeout. Inspectors look for completeness and trend, not for sophistication.
Most findings get logged and dealt with on the normal cycle. A small number warrant immediate action, even if they show up halfway through a walk-around. Stop the inspection and act now if you find:
If any of these come up and you’re not certain about your judgement, call your annual SARI inspector. Most will give a phone or photograph view inside the same working day and most will not charge for a brief consultation between inspections.
The point of a scheduled weekly check is to find damage that hasn’t been noticed. If you only inspect reactively, the inspection itself is moot. Schedule it as a calendar task and stick to the schedule.
Damage on the back face of an upright (especially in double-deep configurations) is rarely the first thing you see. Walking only one face of each aisle misses potentially serious damage. Walk both faces, every time.
Without last week’s findings to compare against, you can’t tell new damage from old or measure progression. Always inspect with the previous log to hand.
If you think a beam might be slightly bent, get a straightedge or rule and measure. The whole traffic light system depends on tolerances; eyeballing turns rules-based decisions into guesses.
A clean week is still a record. Log the inspection even if there’s nothing to flag. A pattern of dated no-finding entries is part of your audit trail.
The PRRS’s weekly check is internal monitoring, not expert inspection. The annual SARI visit is still required for compliance, and provides the documented expert sign-off your insurer and HSE expect to see.
For a typical site of a few thousand pallet locations, expect 1 to 2 hours including logging. Larger sites scale roughly linearly. If you’re consistently spending much more or much less than that, your method probably needs adjusting.
Yes. Some larger sites carry out a partial inspection daily, covering different aisles each day so the whole site is covered weekly. Provided each aisle is inspected at least weekly and findings are consolidated, the regulatory effect is the same.
Isolate the bay first: barrier, signage, instruction to staff not to add or remove load. Then offload as soon as practical, ideally before the end of shift. Document the timeline. The absolute requirement is that the bay does not continue to be used; the speed of offload is judged on what’s reasonably practicable.
Yes. Layout changes are one of the highest-risk events for racking integrity. Beam levels may have moved, bracing may have been removed and not reinstated, load notices may no longer match. A targeted inspection after every reconfiguration (separate from the weekly cycle) is good practice.
The principle is the same but the components differ. For cantilever, your check covers columns, arms, base plates, bracing and load distribution; for pallet, uprights, beams, connectors, base plates and accessories. If your warehouse has both, your weekly inspection should cover both, with appropriate training for the inspector.
At a minimum until the next annual SARI inspection, which uses them as input. In practice keep at least six years to align with limitation periods for personal injury claims, and ideally indefinitely as part of your general H&S documentation.
Who in your team should hold the role, what they actually do, and how it fits into the wider compliance regime.
The one-day course that trains your nominated PRRS in racking anatomy and damage identification.
How damage is classified Red, Amber and Green, the criteria for each, and what each grade requires you to do.
