Stationery and office supplies company Spicers has taken on a fleet of Atlet reach trucks and pallet transporters at its Greenwich regional distribution centre (RDC). Spicers selected the trucks because of their ability to “multi task” in a warehouse that has been configured to give optimum and flexible use of space. They are helping to support 24-hour operations offering rapid-response delivery to customers, mainly wholesalers, in London and the South-east.
The Greenwich RDC, which has replaced Spicers’ Bermondsey, south London facility due to rapid business growth, has two and a half times more cubic capacity. However to ensure that it can accommodate future growth, Spicers has created a diverse storage system to ensure optimum and versatile use of the available space.
As well as conventional pallet racking with bulk storage and picking locations the RDC features a mezzanine floor with shelving for small and fast-moving items – these account for 95% of all orders – that are picked onto conveyors for pick and wrap operations. To enable transfer of these items between the two warehouse zones, a section of live racking feeds pallets onto the mezzanine.
Three new Atlet UNS Tergo reach trucks are being used in the main racked section for putting pallets away and for replenishing the ground level order picking faces each day. They are also used to lift incoming pallets directly up to the mezzanine floor.
Five Atlet TLP pallet transporters are on general pallet handling duties around the RDC. Two are equipped with extra-long forks to accommodate pallets two-up.
The RDC stocks more than 14,000 different product lines and currently undertakes 350-plus pallet movements daily.
Spicers’ distribution manager, Danny Jackson, says: “We needed trucks which could not only undertake the normal warehouse tasks – putaway, retrieval, replenish – but which could also be sufficiently flexible to simultaneously operate within the other different elements of the warehouse layout. With the mezzanine, we’ve gained an extra warehouse-within-a-warehouse, but it needs to be supplied on a virtually non-stop basis.”
