University of Arizona – Maintenance Department
Challenge
The University’s maintenance department was housed in a 7,500 square foot facility with a 15 – 20 foot clear ceiling. The University had to make way for additional power demands and needed to convert the facility from it’s current warehouse and machine shops to a small electrical generation facility. The maintenance team had the challenge of moving the entire facility and maintaining the current storage space with a smaller footprint, 6,500 square feet.
Solution
The University of Arizona’s maintenance team engaged with Gannett Fleming, a consulting engineer firm that leads in resilientand sustainable planning, design and technology. The Gannett Fleming team engaged with the McMurray Stern team, a Western US based engineer and designer of complex storage solutions.
The team accepted the challenge and designed a solution that kept the 6,500 square foot facility with 30 foot clear ceiling. The design utilized a SSI Schaefer Vertical Lift Module with a 20 x 10 x 22 feet of automated storage. In addition to a portion of a mezzanine that was reused from the other facility, the balance of the facility utilized 3 aisles of Rapistak storage solutions with 2 manually controlled cranes. Although the footprint of the new facility was 1,000 square feet smaller, the maintenance department was able to increase net storage by over 25%.
