Pilkington Automotive has appointed Briggs Equipment, the Cat lift truck distributor, to manage its materials handling operations, in a five-year deal worth £1.2 million.
Briggs will provide damage prevention, coupled with battery management and aims to help Pilkington reduce costs at its European distribution centre by nearly £100,000 across its warehousing operations.
Briggs supplied the glass manufacturer with a 29-strong warehouse fleet consisting of Cat reach trucks, electric three and four-wheel counterbalance trucks and power pallets, as well as Dambach man-up VNA equipment.
Briggs’ battery handling and management programme encompasses the entire fleet and includes a state of the art battery racking system and intelligent chargers providing monthly battery performance reports and inclusion of battery maintenance in the standard contract.
Briggs estimates that, over the lifetime of the batteries, this solution will realise cost savings of £93,000 compared to conventional battery systems. In addition, the energy savings will help Pilkington meet its environmental targets by reducing the number of electrical units by nearly 300,000 per year.
A truck management system has also been fitted to each vehicle to boost productivity and made custom modifications to the fleet to ensure each truck is built to meet the specific requirements of each department, as well as being flexible enough to adapt to other departments as necessary.
The service and maintenance contract that Briggs has put in place includes stringent service level agreement which stipulates 90 per cent first fix and fleet uptime rates as well as three hour response from local engineers.
