Golfing apparel company Ashworth Europe is using new Crown pantograph reach trucks at its logistics centre in Laindon, Essex following successful trials. Ashworth Europe, part of Ashworth Inc, serves customers throughout the UK and mainland Europe, stocking more than 900 seasonal product lines at any one time including the very latest golfing hats and fashion wear.
The Laindon facility has been designed to cope with business expansion as well as speed the picking and despatch of more than 6,000 items every working day. In addition to offering same-day despatch for all customer orders received by 4.30pm each evening, Ashworth also provides a fully computerised embroidery facility whereby individual golf club badges and tournament logos, for instance, can be automatically sewn onto various items of clothing.
Aiding both daily output and the input of globally manufactured clothing arriving in container loads every day is the role of the new Crown RDS5000 pantograph reach trucks. The reach trucks also offer the capability of double-deep storage and retrieval functions, enabling Ashworth to further maximise all available pallet storage space at Laindon should the need arise in the future.
Lee Spurgeon, warehouse manager at Ashworth, comments: “While the ability to store 25-30% more pallets in the same floor area is an important option given our continued growth in recent years, setting up the new operation using conventional narrow aisle techniques – allowing us to pick stock from the lower levels and replenish from above – currently makes everything much easier to find and much faster to pick.”
All storage and retrieval activities within the 12-aisle pallet racked complex – there are 15,000 stock locations – are the task of the reach trucks, which have been bought as part of a long-term plan.
