Rolling stock
March 1st 2011 Jungheinrich helps car tyre distributor cope with rising demand with a bespoke
storage design and VNA order pickers
In times of recession the replacement tyre market often
prospers and, true to form, Stapleton's has enjoyed significant
growth during the recent downturn.
"When times are tough, people do not change their cars so
often – they run them for longer which means that new tyres
have to be bought. Throughout the recession, our business has
never been worse than stable and most of the time our sales have
been up," explains head of supply chain, Ashley Croft.
But Stapleton's recent success isn't just down to market forces.
The company has thrived in what is an extremely competitive
sector by putting customer service at the heart of its business
plan.
"Service levels are absolutely key for us," says Croft. "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."
As part of its ongoing commitment to greater supply chain
efficiency, and therefore customer service, last autumn the
company opened a new 100,000 sq ft distribution centre in
Birmingham. Located close to Junction 5 of the M6, the new
facility represents what Croft describes as "a whole new concept
for Stapleton's in terms of the way the company moves tyres
around the business."
The Birmingham DC has the capacity to hold more 250,000
tyre units 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 operated in the UK by Stapleton's but is, by some
margin, the biggest.
Having considered a number of alternative solutions,
Stapleton's chose a storage system designed and supplied by the
Systems and Projects Division of Jungheinrich UK.
Customer orders are picked and stock is replenished using a
fleet of three wire-guided Jungheinrich EKS308 very narrow aisle
(VNA) order pickers. These trucks are capable of operating in
aisles as narrow as 1200mm, although aisles at Stapleton's new
warehouse are in fact wider than this. The wider aisle width was
necessary 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 – even at heights
of over 11 metres.
Slow moving lines
Incoming stock is handballed from trailers with the help of a
conveyor and put into a stillage before being transferred to its
allocated position within the warehouse. Jungheinrich reach
trucks take the stillages of tyres from the goods-in area and put
them away directly in to 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. From here they are collected by the
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 that the stillages lock firmly to the forks of the reach
trucks and the order pickers, 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. A
number of low level order pickers are also used to collate smaller
orders.
Because safety is paramount to Stapleton's the order pickers
are fitted with Jungheinrich's Personnel Protection System (PPS).
The Jungheinrich PPS is different to other systems available
because all hardware, electrics and software is built into the truck
at the point of manufacture to provide a fully integrated
solution. The system is 'self-activating' so there is no need for
additional operational demands on the drivers. If the system
detects an obstacle in its path, the truck will automatically slow
down. If the obstacle remains in the path of the truck, then the
vehicle will be brought to a controlled stop before a collision
occurs - thereby preventing damage to the truck or product.
Personnel detection
Even more critically, if personnel are detected in the path of the
truck, again the slowdown and stop process is activated, ensuring
the highest levels of safety within the working area. 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
and then come to a controlled halt if anything is within two
metres of the vehicle.
The Jungheinrich truck is equipped with RFID floor
transponders and readers. This allows the truck to know its exact
position within each aisle of the warehouse. This was seen by Croft
as a clear advantage of the Jungheinrich proposal, as in the future
the truck can link to a Warehouse Management System (WMS)
providing semi-automatic guided travel to the next location and
thereby increasing pick productivity and accuracy further.
Stapleton's operates its own vehicle fleet – mostly 3.5 tonne
vans – which deliver to a set customer route twice daily and
orders received via the company's web-based ordering system by
7pm are delivered the following day. In addition to the vans, a
fleet of 7.5 Isuzu lorries deliver to other regional distribution
centres within the Stapleton's supply chain model.
"The new site is our 'super hub'", says Croft. "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." More articles from Jungheinrich UK Ltd: | 
