Why Pallet Racking peer review is so hard

If you design or install pallet racking under clause B1 of the New Zealand Building Code, you will have most likely hit a council led peer review at some stage. These can be particularly frustrating experiences, where a continuous stream of questions costs time and money and leaves you wondering whether the engineers you’ve engaged to do the PS1 design even know what they are doing. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence, it’s not just you, and we also see this much more regularly than we would like. We’ve traced the reason for this frustration back to two simple root causes.

1. Council peer reviewers are paid by the question

Councils usually hire peer-review engineers on an hourly basis. Naturally, every extra question and every follow-up RFI translates directly into more billable hours. In short, reviewers are paid more when they ask more. This by itself would be considered a perverse incentive, however internal dynamics compounds this issue.

At a Building Officials Institute of New Zealand conference, I asked consent officials how they gauge the quality of these reviewers. From a council perspective, a longer list of questions signals a thorough reviewer—and gives the council comfort that potential liability is being managed. This means the same behaviour gets rewarded twice: the reviewer earns more by raising questions, and the council treats those questions as proof of diligent work.

In a field with established methods and best practice, I would trust that best practice and our code of ethics would help to push back against these perverse incentives. However, this leads us to the second cause, in the field of Pallet Racking there isn’t an established method or best practice.

2. There is no current best practice to review against

For some time, the industry relied on the BRANZ Design Guide, Seismic Design of High Level Storage Racking Systems with Public Access (Beattie and Deam, 2006). However, it was withdrawn following the Canterbury earthquakes when expectations for structural safety were reset. A replacement has been in the works for over a decade, but it has never seen the light of day.

I spent two years on the four-person committee trying to rewrite it alongside industry representatives, academics, and veteran engineers. Despite our best efforts, we couldn't reach a consensus on the core technical details, and the update is currently shelved. That stalemate perfectly illustrates just how unsettled the engineering methodology remains for pallet racking. 

Without an accepted standard, there is simply no common benchmark for deciding when a design is "done." Common issues we see here are the application of superstructure principles that don’t apply to pallet racking (e.g. overstrength factors for seismic systems when pallet racking doesn’t have separate gravity and seismic systems) or a lack of awareness of pallet racking design peculiarities (e.g. the Beam / Column connection in pallet racking has non-linear rotational stiffness). Perfect grounds for lots of questions.

What that does to the PS1 designer

We design using the most defensible methods available, based on more than a decade of experience. Yet we constantly encounter peer reviews that seem to drag on endlessly. It’s the predictable result of combining hourly billing with zero consensus on methodology: even a rock-solid design ends up looking incomplete under endless scrutiny.

I enjoy Hanlon’s razor, and I don’t believe the endless reviews are strategically or consciously motivated. But some days it makes me wonder whether we need to change our business model, stop doing the PS1 designs, and apply for that council review work instead. However, someone has to move these projects forward, someone has to put their head above the parapet and submit the PS1 design. And hope that next time we hit the same reviewer and things will be easier.

Time to think positively

I don’t like being negative or counterproductive. To break this cycle, we’re changing our approach and within the next month we will be publicly publishing Brevity’s complete engineering methodology for pallet racking. After that, we will begin the process of distributing our method to the council consenting teams, along with the offer of training or workshops as required. This will give council engineers the chance to read, evaluate, and challenge our methods before a project ever goes in for consent, and please, we welcome you to do that.

Because, the technical debate belongs in the open, not hidden inside an endless series of RFIs on a live job, costing real project money and causing real project delays.

Matt Bishop

Managing Director

Brevity