Jungheinrich UK Ltd provides Eezehaul's new facility with forklifts, racking and storage systems.

Rising demand for Eezehaul's storage and distribution services caused it to move to a facility almost three times the size of its old one.

"Our original warehouse was around 30,000 sqft (2,787 sqm)," explains Simon Duggan, Eezehaul's commercial director. "We looked around for other sites that offered greater capacity, but purpose-built units of the size we wanted are relatively scarce in the South East (of England)."

The new 80,000 sqft (7,432 sqm) facility stands on five acres of land and is close to the M25/M23 motorway network. It has nine loading docks but additional office space, racking and other cosmetic changes were needed. While it had been originally designed and used as a distribution centre, the site had most recently been used as a car showroom and store.

Through an open-tender process, the Crawley-based company awarded Jungheinrich UK Ltd the contract to provide the facility's racking and storage systems.

"We met Jungheinrich at a trade show where the company was exhibiting and were impressed by what they had to offer," Duggan explains.

Jungheinrich redeveloped the facility to provide over 5,000 pallet locations. The top beam of the racking structure is 7.8 metres (25.6 feet) high and the aisles are 3.1 metres (10.1 feet) wide. The company had considered condensing the aisles to accommodate more space. However, Eezehaul undertakes case picking at ground level while full pallets are picked from the upper levels, so wider aisles were considered a better option for efficient and safe performance of those functions.

Eezehaul also needed to replace its diesel forklifts. As the new facility is close to a residential area, quiet-running electric forklifts were needed to work into the early hours of the morning without disrupting the neighbours. The company needed forklifts that could operate for two shifts on one battery charge.

"We have lots of forklift movements. For our pallet network activities, we unload double-deck trailers and cross-dock loads before loading pallets onto delivery vehicles. This work tends to peak in the early hours of the morning and again in the evening," Duggan explains.

At other times during the day, the forklifts are used to de-stuff incoming containers and put loads away in the pallet racking.

Having worked with Jungheinrich on the design and build of its facility's racking, Eezehaul approached the company for its materials handling equipment needs. After reviewing Eezehaul's business model, Jungheinrich supplied a fleet of EFG electric counterbalance forklifts, refurbished ETV reach trucks from its "Ready to Go" range, and pallet trucks.

"The mix of counterbalance, reach and pallet trucks that we are operating has proved ideal but we have the option to acquire additional machines or increase our capacity with short term rental trucks as our throughput increases," Duggan says.

Eezehaul is a partner in both the APC and TPN overnight pallet delivery networks and handles around 3000 shipments a day. They and also provide storage, picking, packing and despatch services to a growing range of clients.