Growing demand for storage services led Telford-based Simmonds Transport to consolidate its warehousing with a new 100,000 sq ft unit replacing two old sites.
The multi-user facility has a combination of racked storage and block stacking space and currently houses a broad range of goods from paper to food and electrical products and a priority was to make maximum use of the available space.
The company benchmarked the performance of a range of storage and materials handling equipment options before deciding on a narrow aisle storage system designed around the Flexi articulated truck.
This enabled Simmonds’ to create a racked area of some 12,000 pallet locations while leaving room for block stacking. The top beam of the pallet racking at the site is 10.5 metres high and the aisles are 2.2 metres wide and the racking is served by a fleet of two Flexi HiMax articulated forklift trucks and one Flexi G4 articulated truck.
The Flexi HiMAX allows pallet loads to be stacked 12 metres high and has a heavy duty fixed mast allowing heavier loads can be lifted.
Neil Simmonds, the operator’s sales director, said: “We thought about man-up order pickers but felt that the need for other handling equipment to feed the aisles while the man-up machines put away and picked orders was not cost or time efficient.”
The majority of incoming loads that arrive at Simmonds’ new warehouse are unloaded from trailers using pallet trucks and delivered to a marshalling area where they are collected by the Flexi articulated trucks and put away in the designated pallet location. For outgoing goods, full pallet loads and case quantity order picking and order assembly processes are undertaken using the Flexis.
“Once we had decided to use articulated forklift trucks we reviewed the various options that are available and had no hesitation in specifying Flexi,” said Simmonds. “I liked the compactness of the design and the fact that they are very well built in the UK.”
