Barloworld offered John Lewis staff a VNA handling solution that enabled them to work with walk on racking over 10metres high.

The UK's largest department store has chosen Barloworld Handling for its materials handling challenges.

John Lewis typically stocks about 350,000 separate product lines for its 29 shops and has a growing online business. With a diverse product offering ranging from electrical, gifts and toys to garments, beauty and home and garden, the size and shape of the products presented the department store with storage challenges.

"Mattresses, washing machines, sofas and other large and heavy goods all have to be stored carefully while maximising the space available in our warehouses," explains Ted Weager, John Lewis' senior project engineer.

"We wanted to store products at heights over 10 metres (32.8 feet), which is easily achieved for palletised goods but not when large items need material handling," Weager adds.

John Lewis had previously used aisle cranes in some of its operations but wanted a flexible solution that was more cost-effective. It looked at the possibility of an order-picking forklift with a long cage on the front.

"Barloworld was the only company that could offer a solution. They already had a proven innovation using the Hyster C1.5 VNA machine with a walk-on platform and lattice gates on both sides," Weager says.

The company trialled the concept at the Park Royal facility in London and now has three machines operating there.

In the northern hemisphere spring of 2009, John Lewis opened a combined service centre in Avonmouth to provide warehousing for stores and home delivery in Wales, Bristol and the south west of England.

Due to the success of the Hysters in London, John Lewis designed the new facility based on Barloworld's solution and now operates three Hyster VNA c.15L order-picking machines in 10 aisles.

"We have maximised storage space in the new Avonmouth warehouse cube and spent only a quarter of what we would otherwise have invested on cranes," Weager says, adding that life-time costs are also greatly reduced.

The VNA machines operate using wire guidance on a "super flat" warehouse floor in 1.7 metre- (5.6 feet) wide aisles. Before the driver can operate the truck, the metal lattice gates must be closed on both sides. As an additional safety feature, once the operator is positioned in the correct bay, he or she must press a button triggering flaps on both sides of the cage to bridge the short gap between the platform and the racking.

The lattice gates, with gaps too small for hands to go through, can then be opened a full 2.7 metres (8.9 feet), allowing a two-man team walk-on access to the racking for items such as large mattresses.

"At 10 metres (32.8 feet), the cage feels incredibly stable with minimum movement, giving the team an enclosed environment in which to pick and put away stock quickly and efficiently," Weager says.

Barloworld also supplied Hyster P2.0 powered pallet trucks for lateral goods movement in the facility and a Hyster Matrix reach truck fitted with a carpet boom to handle carpets up to 7.5 metres (24.6 feet) long.

Hyster claims to be the only manufacturer of a VNA machine with a mast strong enough to handle a three-metre long cage with a 800kg (1,764lbs) load in any location on the platform. Barloworld is the UK's exclusive distributor for Hyster equipment since 1956. It maintains nearly 30,000 forklifts in the UK.