 Customer orders are picked and stock replenished by a fleet of three wire-guided Jungheinrich EKS308 very narrow aisle (VNA) order pickers. |
Stapleton's, the UK's largest car tyre distributor, has moved to a stillage and racking-based system for its new distribution centre in Birmingham.
The company, which stocks tyres from all major manufacturers including Bridgestone, Continental and Dunlop, operates over 100 retail centres in the UK and has thrived in an extremely competitive sector by prioritising customer service. Ashley Croft, head of supply chain, says an efficient supply chain is vital to the British firm.
"Service levels are absolutely key for us," Croft says. "A lot of our customers are owner-operators who rely on us to get tyres to them in the shortest possible time, so an efficient supply chain is essential."
Stapleton's opened its new 100,000 sqft (9,290 sqm) distribution centre in Birmingham last year. Close to Junction 5 of the M6, the facility is what Croft describes as "a whole new concept for Stapleton's in terms of the way the company moves tyres around the business".
The hub has the capacity to hold over 250,000 tyres and serves a geographical area as far north as Stoke, down to Corby in the south, to Nottingham and Leicester in the east and across to parts of Wales in the west. It is one of nine warehouses Stapleton's operates in the UK.
Stapleton's has chosen a storage system designed and supplied by Jungheinrich UK Ltd's Systems and Projects division.
Customer orders are picked and stock replenished by a fleet of three wire-guided Jungheinrich EKS308 very narrow aisle (VNA) order pickers. The trucks can operate in aisles as narrow as 1.2 metres (3.9 feet) although Stapleton's new warehouse's aisles are wider to accommodate the dimensions of the order picking cages, which have been designed to enable the optimum volume of orders to be safely and cost-efficiently picked.
A conveyor helps handball incoming stock from trailers and put them into a stillage before transferring them to allocated positions in the warehouse. Jungheinrich reach stackers take the stillages of tyres from the goods-in area and put them away directly into the racking or in the case of slow-moving lines, drop the stillages off at a marshalling area at the end of the allocated aisle. They are then collected by order pickers and the tyres are put away in the stock-keeping stillage which remains on the racking shelf.
Jungheinrich's engineers developed a simple hook mechanism to ensure the stillages lock firmly to the reach trucks and order pickers' forks while a load sensor tells the operator that the load can be safely picked up.
When it comes to picking, a paper-based picking list is created and orders are picked directly to stillages using the order pickers and transferred to the goods-out area by the reach trucks. Low-level order pickers are also used to collate smaller orders.
The order pickers are fitted with Jungheinrich's Personnel Protection System (PPS). Jungheinrich says the PPS is different to other systems because all hardware, electrics and software is built into the truck at the point of manufacture to provide a fully integrated solution.
In Stapleton's case, the Jungheinrich PPS has been pre-programmed so that the trucks slow down if any obstacle is detected within five metres (16.4 feet) and then come to a controlled halt if anything is within two metres (6.6 feet) of the vehicle.
The Jungheinrich truck is equipped with RFID floor transponders and readers. This allows the truck to know its exact position in each aisle of the warehouse. Croft saw this as a clear advantage of the Jungheinrich proposal because in the future the truck can link to a Warehouse Management System (WMS) providing semi-automatic guided travel to the next location, thereby increasing pick productivity and accuracy further.
"The new site is our 'super hub'", Croft says. "It is key to our business and the move away from our old storage model to the new stillage and racking-based system is bringing significant throughput efficiencies to our business."