Britvic Soft Drinks' partnership with Barloworld Handling has helped the company reduce costs and optimise efficiency.

UK beverage firm Britvic Soft Drinks says partnering with Barloworld Handling to manage its 200-plus materials handling vehicles on its six different sites has helped reduce costs and optimise efficiency.

The company that sells brands like Robinsons, Fruit Shoot, Tango and J2O, sells about 1.4 billion litres of soft drinks annually. It operates six UK production facilities and a national distribution centre based in Lutterworth, Leicestershire.

"All drinks are palletised and handled by the materials handling fleet critical to every Britvic operation," says regional drive site manager Chris Jackson.

Britvic has developed a partnership with Barloworld over the past 10 years. The latter provides a bespoke service for the soft drinks seller's materials handling fleet in the UK.

"The [Barloworld] team has helped us improve our understanding of how we use the equipment and how we can manage it more effectively to improve performance and reduce downtime," Jackson says.

Barloworld manages over 200 of Britvic's Hyster vehicles ranging from counterbalance forklifts, to order pickers and pallet trucks.

"Truck utilisation is now properly managed so that we balance the hours used across the fleet and centrally manage life-time costs. This has had a significant, positive impact and our contracts with Barloworld are now tuned accordingly," Jackson explains.

Britvic's 275,000sqft (25,548sqm) Lutterworth distribution centre receives about 60% of all Britvic's finished products, handling 470 vehicles a day in peak periods. Pallets are received by lorry and unloaded by eight Hyster Fortens forklifts with a double pallet handling attachment.

Steve Martin, facilities manager at Lutterworth, explains that fleet intelligence positively affects the operation. "The Fortens trucks should work 70 to 80 hours a week in an intense, short -run, stop-start operation but we were finding the hours were incredibly high for some trucks but not others. We now direct drivers to use specific trucks for each shift, saving money and optimising the management of scheduled maintenance."

Barloworld introduced its new fleet management system to Britvic last year. It uses a unique telemetry device to transmit data from all Britvic's trucks directly to Barloworld's secure bank office management system. The system collects, analyses and reports truck performance data like hour-meter readings, impacts, maintenance completion and cost of ownership information. Data for all sites is then accessible via a secure online portal, providing an instant audit trail.

Goods received at Lutterworth are transferred from lorries to an automated pallet handling system by the forklifts and then stored in high-bay warehousing with over 50,000 pallet locations. Over 300 pallets are then typically picked per hour for onward distribution and loaded onto trailers by the Hyster forklifts with double pallet handlers or loaded into containers by the forklifts on a ramp.

Pallets are also transferred to the case picking area where 12 Hyster LO2.0M low-level order pickers and two Hyster J1.80XMTs are used for picking about 30,000 cases in 24 hours. The machines operate with a spare battery supported by Barloworld's Total Battery Management service that incorporates Hoppecke's Trak-air technology.