Welcome to the 15 October Warehouse & Logistics News. We have features on Racking & Shelving, taking in pallet racking, cantilever racking, shelving and storage solutions, and Containers, which includes plastic and metal containers and cages. One container company ‘thinking outside the box’ is injection-moulded storage solutions provider George Utz Ltd, interviewed exclusively here. A growing part of its business is custom products tailored to specific customers’ operations. Hence George Utz has formed a dedicated solutions team focused on understanding customers’ exact requirements and ensuring customer-specific products are organised and delivered on time.
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In some manufacturing companies, special projects are poor cousins to the standard products business in terms of resources allocated. Not at George Utz. With 80% of its UK business customer-specific, there are plenty of resources for projects.
Britain’s schools and colleges are back in class for the new school year. Senior warehousing and logistics people often wax enthusiastic about their apprenticeships and the skills they learnt. But the thought of today’s apprenticeships could not be much duller for the present generation, if you take a straw poll among a group of teens.
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Like much else in today’s culture it takes the stars of hit TV shows to establish that business can be exciting. Dragon’s Den’s Theo Paphitis reportedly does regular talks to school leavers, presumably an epiphany for teenagers left less than motivated after ten years plus of classroom boredom.
Now another Dragon, Peter Jones, is to head a new academy to teach budding entrepreneurs the tricks of the trade. The newly announced National Skills Academy for Enterprise will offer vocational courses for about 11,000 eager 16-19’s in its first three years. To the cynical it sounds a bit like our sport academies – ‘too little, too late’ – but with the right investment, in a few years we could see Britain’s skills flourishing, reminiscent of Team GB’s success in Beijing this summer.
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In this issue we’ve also got episode 33 of the History of The Forklift, bringing us up to the start of 1960. By all accounts it was an exciting time in materials handling in the UK, with people in the business looking forward to the then seventh Mechanical Handling Exhibition at Earls Court. Hopefully as the economy starts to pick up between now and the 2012 Olympics we will return to that level of optimism, but it would be good to have a Dragon or two breathing fire into things.
Have a successful month.
Charles Smith
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