WAREHOUSING & MATERIALS HANDLING u ERIKS
Part and parcel
Industrial products distributor, ERIKS, has boosted the productivity of its order fulfilment operations by 110%, following a logistics network transformation that combines smart software with well-integrated small- parts automation, says Andy Neville, the company’s general manager of supply chain operations
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RIKS is one of the UK and Ireland’s largest specialist suppliers of industrial parts and products, providing a vast array of
components and services to a broad spectrum of industrial applications, from chemical plants, manufacturing lines and power generation sites, to varied production operations for small-to- medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Over the last 80 years the company has built
an enviable reputation for its expertise in areas from bearings & lubrication, power transmission and fluid power, to transfer & control, flow control and industrial MRO. All the critical elements needed to keep industry running smoothly.
The cornerstone of the business is its market- leading attention to customer service, with high availability, order accuracy and fast, next-day delivery. Now, following a £20 million investment
32 January 2024 Irish Manufacturing
programme to support growth and boost service performance still further, ERIKS has recently opened a state-of-the-art Fulfilment Centre of Expertise (FCE) in Oldbury, West Midlands – the centre piece of a new direct to customer delivery model.
DIRECT APPROACH We ship over 1,500 orders a day, mainly to the UK and Ireland. We had been operating a traditional hub and spoke logistics model, serving the service centre network across the country and they would perform the final mile delivery to the customer. However, we wanted to future-proof the quality of our customer service, with greater availability, capacity, accuracy, and speed. So now, with the direct model, all orders are despatched from the FCE in Oldbury by 9.30pm, with the majority of orders arriving with the customer the
following day before mid-morning. The purpose-built, 11,000sq m highly automated FCE replaces two warehouses – Halesowen and Dudley – offering ERIKS a 53% increase in warehouse capacity, with space for up to 11,200 Euro pallets. However, as 80% of the stock keeping units (SKUs) within the system are small parts, the beating heart of the fulfilment operation is the advanced, hi-tec small parts picking operation, designed and installed by warehouse automation specialists, Invar Group. Working to a tight schedule, in January 2021
Invar Group software developers and integration engineers set about installing over 400m of high-speed tote conveyors, linking 21 small-parts storage vertical lifts in a finely tuned automated picking system capable of processing 1,500 orders per hour. The design groups three vertical lifts per picking cell, making seven cells in total, with one
www.irish-manufacturing.com
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