Feature Lift trucks Spreading the load to save costs
Dairy foods company Dairy Crest recently switched to Jungheinrich lift trucks at its National Distribution Centre in Nuneaton because the batteries used to power both the Jungheinrich order pickers and ride-on pallet handlers are interchangeable meaning the company could make an 18 per cent saving in costs
Jungheinrich’s ride- on pallet handlers and order pickers use batteries which are interchangeable
within confined spaces such as lorries. The ERE’s powerful three-phase AC drive motor delivers the highest performance, while Jungheinrich’s ShockProtect system protects the opera- tor, truck and load from vibration. The trucks are also fitted with Curve Control for increased safety when cornering. Following a profile check, each incoming pallet’s identity is verified against information held on Dairy Crest’s warehouse management system (WMS) before being sent to its allo- cated location within the store. A rapid pallet transport monorail system delivers each pallet to its allocated aisle where it is put away in the rack- ing by automated crane.
airy Crest manufactures a range of everyday dairy brands including the award-winning Cathedral City cheddar, Clover spread, Country Life butter and FRijj, a top selling flavoured milk drink. The company also supplies milk to retail- ers throughout the country, from major supermarkets to village stores, while the company’s milkmen deliver milk – and more – to thousands of doorsteps in England and Wales every day. Dairy Crest’s £38m national distrib- ution centre and cheese maturation store in Nuneaton dispatches some 2,500 pallet loads of dairy products
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daily to over 500 delivery points throughout the UK. With a 27,000 square metre footprint the facility comprises two fully auto- mated high-bay warehouses – one han- dling cheese maturation with storage capacity for over 35,000 pallets and a second with the capacity to store 10,000 pallets of finished products. Incoming goods at the NDC are transferred from trailers to one of four automated receiving conveyors using Jungheinrich ERE 225 powered pallet trucks with fixed stand-on platforms. Because of its compact design, the ERE is particularly suited to working
Jungheinrich UK T: 01908 363100
jungheinrich.co.uk Enter 357
Wholesaler increases storage with articulated forklift D
oncaster based CEFCO, the distribution arm of electrical wholesale network CEF, has been able to increase storage density by 30 per cent at its 37,000ft² footprint warehouse by bringing in an Aisle-Master articulated forklift as a
replacement for reach trucks. This has allowed it to cope with an increase in the volume of goods at the warehouse. “The upsurge in business coincided with our fleet of reach trucks nearing the end of its working life,” explains ware- house manager Neil Dillon. “The Aisle-Master’s ability to work in narrow aisles has enabled us to drastically reduce the widths between racking and increase the pallet count from 1,300 to 2,000. This has also avoided the need for additional outlay on extra warehousing facilities.” Aisle-Masters have a reputation for build quality and reliable operation, and Dillon was struck by this when he looked at the various articulated brands on the market. “You could tell just by its appearance that it stood out from the rest – we all liked the fact that it is a sturdy piece of well engineered kit with a high end finish, made of solid steel with no flimsy fibre glass panels.” In practice the truck has proved to be as reliable as it is good looking: it has a 100 per cent operational record in its 18 months of service and has had no need of any attention from service engineers. An AC electric powered Aisle-Master model was chosen from the range, and its versatility enables it to work as a reach truck for outside offloading and loading, before taking the pallets to the interior racking. With lift capacities of up to 12.5m it easily copes with CEFCO’s top racking height of 8m. Aisle-Masters can work in aisles of just 1.75m, have capacities of up to 2.5 tonnes, lift heights of up to 12.5 metres, with a choice of AC electric or LPG power. It comes with a parts warranty of five years or 5,000 hours. Aisle-Master T: 07870 976758
www.aisle-master.com
Enter 358 S10
Finished products ready for dis- patch are stored in a two-tier picking hall. The picking aisles are replen- ished by five storage and retrieval cranes and there are 1,000 picking locations at ground floor level. A fleet of Junghenrich ECE 220 low level order pickers is at the heart of the picking operation. The ECE 220 offers high acceleration and travel speed with low energy consumption – factors that were important at a facility with such a high throughput. To plan the optimum picking route, the ECE 220s are fitted with radio data terminals. Once picked, orders are delivered by the order picking trucks to a marshalling area where they are loaded onto trail- ers using the Jungheinrich ERE trucks. Dairy Crest had, until recently, been using another make of lift truck at the Nuneaton store but switched to Jungheinrich because the batteries used to power the order pickers and the ride-on pallet handlers are inter- changeable allowing Dairy Crest to minimise the number of batteries it uses and save 18 per cent in costs. “Picking and loading is hard on a
truck’s batteries,” says warehouse operations manager, Brandon J, Moss. “Apart from the significant cost bene- fits that have resulted from reducing the number of batteries we need, we have also been able to allocate an area of our charging bay to other things.” Dairy Crest operates 33 order pick- ing trucks, 12 ride-on pallet trucks and four electric and diesel counterbalance trucks at the Nuneaton store. “By automating the bulk pallet oper- ation and then designing the picking operation to be as flexible as possible, Dairy Crest’s Nuneaton site is an excel- lent example of how automated and manual handling systems can work together,” says Craig Johnson, Jungheinrich UK’s marketing manager.
JANUARY 2012 Materials Handling & Logistics
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