Blog
Maintenance engineering, not marketing fluff
Reliability engineering, preventive maintenance and industry research for teams running automated warehouse equipment — pegged to current data, written by the people who build the platform.
Reliability engineering
When your conveyor stops being the forgiving part of the system
Conveyors usually give you options — reroute, buffer, work around a jam. Tighten the layout enough to remove that redundancy, and a single jam starts behaving exactly like a stalled shuttle.
Industry signal
The 2026 automated-warehouse market, in the numbers that matter to maintenance teams
STIQ's research is written for buyers deciding whether to automate. Here's the same data, read from the other side of the building — by the people who'll be keeping whatever gets installed running.
From manual to maintenance-ready
What actually eats the first 90 days of a new automated line
It's not the equipment install. It's translating a shelf of OEM manuals into a maintenance programme that's actually complete — the unglamorous work that decides whether year one goes smoothly.
Reliability engineering
Cold storage automation fails differently — and most PM schedules aren’t built for it
Batteries drain faster, steel contracts, condensation fogs sensors. A preventive maintenance schedule written for ambient-temperature automation doesn’t survive a freezer aisle unmodified.
Reliability engineering
Pallet shuttle preventive maintenance checklist: daily, weekly, monthly and annual
A working checklist for pallet shuttle systems — what to check on the shuttle, the lift, the rails and the safety circuit at each interval, and how to turn it into a programme that matches the OEM manual rather than someone's memory of it.
Reliability engineering
Conveyors are boring. That’s exactly why they’re your biggest downtime risk
Robots and shuttles get the sensors and the attention. The conveyor and sortation backbone connecting them is still where most unplanned downtime on an automated line actually starts.
Reliability engineering
The maintenance bill nobody puts in the AMR fleet business case
Every robot vendor added to a fleet brings its own OEM manual, its own service interval and its own parts list. The ROI case for going multi-vendor rarely accounts for what that costs to maintain.
Compliance & safety
LOLER doesn’t stop at the forklift: statutory inspection in an automated warehouse
Gantry cranes, MEWPs and goods lifts inside an automated facility are still lifting equipment under UK law. Here is what the statutory inspection regime actually requires — and why the paper trail keeps failing it.
Reliability engineering
Why pallet shuttle systems fail — and how to catch it before a lane goes down
Not every shuttle failure means a lost lane — but some do. What separates a graceful 5% dip from a fully stranded rack, and the early signals that let you catch it before it gets there.
Reliability engineering
AS/RS maintenance: the preventive schedule that actually prevents downtime
An automated storage and retrieval system is a multi-million-pound single point of failure. Here is what a preventive schedule needs to cover, and why most of them are built on guesswork.