The Potter Group chose a high-bay very narrow aisle racking design served by Narrow Aisle Flexi articulated forklifts

UK logistics service provider The Potter Group has more than quadrupled the storage area in one of its distribution centres through the use of articulated forklifts.

The Potter Group's distribution centre at Knowsley, Merseyside provides 165,000 sqft (15,329 sqm) of shared user warehousing. The facility had been mainly used as a bulk paper store until 2007 when its use was switched to the storage of pharmaceutical and chemical products, clinical nutrition and other prescription products.

When the site was used as a bulk paper store, its pallet capacity had been just over 4,000 locations. This was insufficient to cope with the demands of Potter's growing client base in the private medical sector.

Bryan Mulvey, general manager of the Knowsley distribution centre, says the group's priority was to achieve maximum storage density with the square footage that was available. "We considered using reach trucks but decided that articulated forklifts offered greater throughput and flexibility."

The company settled on a high-bay very narrow aisle racking design served by Narrow Aisle Flexi articulated forklifts. The top beam of the new racking layout is 11.2 metres (36.8 feet) high and the aisles are 2.2 metres (7.2 feet) wide. The new storage area provides a total of 16,743 pallet locations, and because of the fluctuating production and sales patterns of the products stored at Knowsley, it has been designed to allow slow moving and frequently picked items to be accommodated.

The Potter Group operates a fleet of five electric-powered Flexi trucks at Knowsley. All of the pallet put-away and picking is undertaken by the Flexis while the loading and unloading of trailers in the yard is performed by the Flexis and some counterbalance forklifts.

Mulvey says the articulated forklifts' ability to unload incoming trailers like a counterbalance machine and serve the facility's VNA racking means the company is able to reduce double handling and cut the overall size of its forklift fleet.

Established in 1965, The Potter Group offers about 1.6 million sqft (148,645 sqm) of warehousing and 250 acres (101 hectares) of external storage from five facilities in the UK.