Investing in futures
October 1st 2004

With the backing of an international group that sees investment in manufacturing as the way forward, Stow UK is one racking company that aims to provide quality and longevity. Charlotte Stonestreet reports

Although in racking company terms, Stow UK is a relatively young enterprise, it is one that intends to be around for a long time. A wholly owned subsidiary of Belgium-based Stow International, the UK company was set up in 1993 by John Azzopardi. Previously, Stow International had had a fairly limited presence in the UK, but Azzopardi, together with his son Matt, started to really make a mark by moving the company towards extensive project work, rather than simply providing relatively small orders of basic product.

John Azzopardi recently retired, handing over the Stow UK reins to new managing director, Tony Lock. As someone with vast experience of the manufacturing industry, Lock has seen companies suffering from lack of investment, but, he says, the move to Stow is presenting him with a completely different world.

High-tech manufacturing

Most of the product supplied by Stow UK is manufactured at the international group’s manufacturing facility in Dottignes, Belgium.

In contrast to much of the beleaguered UK manufacturing base, Stow International has a clear policy of investing in manufacturing equipment to underpin future growth. The emphasis is on high-tech manufacturing.

‘Stow is effectively ensuring that it is future-proof by investing heavily in its production machinery and keeping staffing levels down to a minimum,’ says Matt Azzopardi, distributor sales manager at Stow.

‘The result is a high quality product manufactured at a relatively low unit cost.’ Most of the new product development also takes place in Belgium, although if Stow UK has a specific need or idea they are able to have a direct input.

‘A good example would be our Z beam profile for pallet racking, which a new product on the market,’ says Azzopardi.

‘Traditionally Stow has tended to concentrate on the heavy-duty side of racking, so the range for lighter loads was not as comprehensive. We recognised the need for a lighter duty product, resulting in the development of the Z-beam, which allows you to drop a panel into it for lighter loads.’ In fact, with this kind of pro-active engineering growth, the group is looking at development options all the time to ensure it has a product range to meet all racking and shelving needs. This fits in directly with Lock’s plans to further develop Stow UK’s exstock service for distributors.

‘Now we can not only provide traditional pallet racking and shelving, but also something referred to as midi-rack, which is somewhere between the two,’ says Lock.

‘We have a full product range, from basic shelving that can be used to store archive files or components to heavy-duty pallet racking for distribution centres.’ Another important business area for Stow UK is its larger integrated projects.

Tending to be new-build, recent examples include two new distribution centres for Wilco. The company is also currently working on a major facility for a shoe retailer that includes the largest miniload system in Europe.

Another case typical of Stow’s project work was for office materials distributor, Kingfield Heath. When the company decided to build a national distribution centre it aimed to maximise storage capacity within the 20,000m2 footprint and introduce a degree of automation without compromising flexibility.

Due to the diverse nature of the 20,000 different types of products at the facility, they were divided into different groups with different storage needs. Non-standard or ‘ugly’ loads such as furniture are laid in pallet racking with wide aisles to enable ease of picking with forklifts and pallet trucks. This 10m high system has room for 7500 UK pallets.

Palletised goods that can be transported by conveyor are stored in a 12,000 capacity narrow aisle area. Within this layout different sub-systems handle differing operational requirements, for instance decked rack beams provide high level shelving for multilevel picking of slow moving items. Products with an average circulation rate are picked from pallets at ground level, while fast moving items are stored in pallet live storage.

Miniload system

Vital to the project, a miniload system replenishes carton live storage, shelving and vertical storage silos on a mezzanine picking floor. The 14m high automatic binning and retrieval system is equipped with 5 stacker cranes and has a 58,000 tray capacity with a cycle time of 400 trays per hour.

Although Stow may not offer the cheapest solutions in the market, the company’s systems definitely offer value for money.

Customers get a quality product combined with design expertise and the ability to work in partnership.

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