The Potter Group has revamped its Knowsley warehouse to increase capacity to meet the changing range of products stored there.
The 165,000 sq ft warehouse was used mainly as a bulk paper store until 2007, when the emphasis was switched to the storage of pharmaceutical and chemical products, clinical nutrition and other prescription foods. As a result it needed to increase pallet capacity from the existing 4,000 locations.
The company settled on a high bay very narrow aisle racking design served by articulated forklifts.
Bryan Mulvey, general manager at Knowsley said: “Our priority from the outset was to achieve maximum storage density within the square footage we had available. We considered using reach trucks but decided that articulated forklifts offered greater throughput and flexibility.”
The top beam of the new racking layout is 11.2 metres high and the aisles are 2.2 metres wide. In total, the new storage area provides 16,743 pallet locations and, because of the fluctuating production and sales patterns of the products stored at Knowsley, it has been designed to allow both slow moving and frequently picked items to be accommodated.
Potter chose five electric-powered Narrow Aisle Flexi trucks for the site. All of the pallet put away and picking within the racking is undertaken by the Flexis while the job of unloading and loading incoming and departing trailers in the yard is shared between the Flexi articulated trucks and some counterbalanced trucks.
