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Lift truck supplier Atlet has helped to significantly improve efficiency and performance at Alliance Flooring Distribution’s warehouse by supplying a new fleet of trucks equipped with special booms to help handle rolls of carpet.
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lliance Flooring Distribution has significantly improved materials handling performance at its main warehouse in Kidderminster
by working closely with lift truck supplier Atlet. Storage capacity has been maximised and the time products spend on site before delivery to customers has been minimised. The fleet supplied by Atlet includes eight reach trucks with special booms to handle rolls of carpet around the warehouse in an efficient and well-organised operation. “We have been impressed by Atlet's approach,” said Nigel Wilkes, warehouse manager at Alliance Flooring Distribution. “They’ve done what they said they would and, two years into the contract, the service has been excellent.” With a heritage that can be traced back to some of the area’s oldest manufacturers, Alliance Flooring Distribution was formed in 2004 to provide carpet storage and distribution services for parent company Abingdon Carpets as well as a number of local independent and overseas producers. The warehouse occupies a number of interlinked buildings on a site that has been involved with carpet making for generations.
Alliance selected Atlet as its new supplier in 2006 when the existing fleet of reconditioned trucks, from another manufacturer, was at the end of contract. These machines had proved unreliable once the workload increased following a move to 24/6 operations. There had been a few issues with servicing and Alliance wanted to make sure its replacements would perform to specification.
Atlet representatives visited
Kidderminster to discuss the requirements and suggested a week- long loan of a reach truck, temporarily equipped with a carpet boom, so that the warehouse staff could carry out a proper evaluation. The drivers liked the truck and the Atlet team met them to gather feedback and arrange some modifications. This included fitting holsters for hand-held barcode scanners and clipboards at convenient positions in the cab. As the existing trucks came to the end of their individual lease contracts they were replaced by eight Atlet UHS reach trucks with an identical specification that helps to promote driver familiarity and simplify maintenance.
The reach trucks are used to handle four and five metre carpet rolls weighing as much as 450kg to heights up to 10m. A special steel boom mounted on the truck’s modified carriage is inserted into the centre of the roll which is then handled between special deep-racking storage and order assembly areas. Alliance specified a tilting carriage as this made it easier to control and position loads in this particular type of application than the alternative of a tilting mast.
One of the features on the Forte UHS reach truck that particularly appealed to Nigel Wilkes was the S3 Stability Support System. This automatically provides higher truck stability by governing speed and acceleration in conjunction with steering sensitivity. S3 automatically reduces the speed of truck functions in proportion to the height lifted, overrides unsafe manoeuvres and reduces jerkiness in the manipulation of the controls to combine optimum performance and productivity with
maximum safety.
“We had an issue with the previous trucks and when we mentioned the new ones had the S3 system to the HSE they were impressed,” said Nigel Wilkes. “It’s a good safety feature.”
To complete its original fleet Alliance selected three Nissan electric counterbalance trucks, supplied by Atlet, for loading and unloading vehicles. These trucks, which also have special boom carriages, have shorter masts than the reach trucks which allows them to work in the loading bay and inside the vehicle bodies and containers used for shipping carpets to customers.●
www.atlet.com
www.PressOnShD.com April 2010 ShD 49
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