Bringing home the bacon
June 1st 2009 Loadhog's Ed Fanshawe says its Queens Award for Enterprise – Innovation, is proof that
solving problems with creative thought pays dividends. Now the firm is set to solve more...
Winning the 2009 Queens Award
for Enterprise-Innovation was a
pivotal moment in the
development of Loadhog, a re-usable
transit packaging pioneer based in
Sheffield – and proves genuine innovation
is very much alive within British
manufacturing. By taking the time to
understand and intelligently solve every
day problems that exist in UK industry,
ideas can be taken from concept to
international markets with a little hard
work and objective thought, which is
ethos on which the company was
founded.
The foundations for Loadhog as a
business were laid down in 2004 with the
development of the Loadhog Lid – a reusable
pallet Lid designed to allow instant
securing of a loaded
pallet with zero
one-trip packaging.
The Lid was created
as a generic
solution for many
industries –
speeding up
operations by at
least 1-2 minutes
for every pallet
secured,
eliminating
traditional securing
material and
equipment costs,
eliminating waste
and providing a
level of security that
allows even delicate products to be double
stacked in transit and hence maximise
vehicle fill. Despite significant successes
with this product since launch nearly five
years ago, the market for the Lid is being
revitalised by on-going environmental
legislation aimed at
reducing plastic waste and
also by corporate
determination to seek
efficiency in every area of
the supply chain. What's
become clear is that socalled
"green solutions"
like the Loadhog Lid are
not just ideas for tree
huggers or benevolent
corporations but they are
quite simply basic
common sense and they
are becoming ever more
critical to business
success in these
times of economic
hardship.
Since the original
Lid, Loadhog has
developed the 'Pally'
as a retail
merchandising unit –
a pallet and wheeled
dolly in one
integrated unit.
Pally's development
was more specific than
the Lid. With the
concept born as a
solution to Royal Mail's complaint
that "dollies could not be braked
sufficiently", the final product
was only created in response
to an IGD project to find a
means of bridging the gap
between supplier's needs for a
pallet on automated lines and
retailers requirement for a
mobile platform in store.
Since inception, the Pally has
been especialy useful when
used with the 'half-euro' sized
Loadhog Lid as a system in
general industry, healthcare,
food processing and more
recently, the UK Mail/Postal
Industry. The Pally & Lid
system enables a more user
friendly, waste free method of
handing and moving product.
Using Pally means loads of 500kg can be
transformed from a standard pallet to a
fully mobile wheeled dolly unit instantly
on demand with one foot press on a pedal
at either end. This eliminates the
requirement for any pump trucks or
forklifts within operations and loading
bays and provides the opportunity for
significant labour savings. Weighing only
21kg in total, the Pally system also enables
more than 40% increase in trailer fill when
loaded and up to 60% when empty with
less dead-weight equipment using up fuel.
Lighter, easy to use, waste-free and
highly efficient… it ticks a lot of boxes in a
lot of industries and we hope this market
will continue to grow as the Pally becomes
a more widely known.
In addition, within approximately two
years of launch, SmartStak now moves in
excess of 30% of the UK
market for new glass
beer/wine bottles and
the product is taking off
across the world.
Through introducing
SmartStak to replace
the old layer pad and
wood top frame, clients
have been able to
eliminate virtually all
instances of pallet
collapses for "tall-pack"
beer bottle pallets, at the
same time as increasing
trailer use by 10% and
eliminating 75% of the one
trip packaging.
With our eight man team of
permanent design engineers, the first
chapter in Loadhog's development has
been a success. We have Her Majesty the
Queen to thank for starting the next
chapter in the same manner. While it is
too soon to release new product details at
present, Loadhog is set to launch a brand
new product later this year: Watch out for
details of the 'HOGBOX System' (pictured
as a 3D drawing) in a future issue of
Handling & Storage solutions. More articles from Loadhog Ltd: | 
