Welcome to the 1st April Warehouse & Logistics News. Spring is in the air – it’s official! As we went to press just before the Chancellor announced the latest budget, UK manufacturers were enjoying a strong start to 2014 and feeling confident about the outlook going forward, according to their industry body, the Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF.) It’s good news for the UK’s warehousing and logistics industry – more raw materials and finished goods to be stored and moved around, more work for warehousing professionals and more demand for equipment and logistics services to do the job.
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The EEF survey showed stronger output and orders than the final quarter of 2013, with recruitment and investment intentions the highest level recorded by the survey. Export orders were also up strongly from the previous quarter. EEF chief economist Lee Hopley called it the most positive set of indicators for some time.
As the economy picks up, we have features for you on The Loading Bay, including industrial doors, dock levelers and dock lifts, and those workhorses of the industry, fork trucks.
Speaking of which, the UK grocery industry has weathered the recession better than non-food manufacturing, for example, but there’s always room for new equipment and solutions to improve retailers’ and wholesalers’ efficiency in the warehouse and logistics department. As featured on our cover, Flexi Narrow Aisle’s Warehouse Systems Division has launched the FlexiPiCK – a layer picking-based storage and order fulfillment solution offering case pick rates of over 1,000 outers per hour per operator. The FlexiPiCK is ideal for building mixed pallet loads and is suited for handling and picking layers of product from palletised loads and assembling full pallets of mixed product. It is especially suited to grocery retail, with huge volumes of packaged, canned and bottled products passing through the supply chain.
Flexi Narrow Aisle’s FlexiPiCK builds on the product layer marketing concept, widely used in the US to handle fragile and glass packaged products with great success. Layer picking is increasingly seen as a time and manpower-efficient means of compiling mixed pallet loads for order fulfillment. Other solutions have been developed that increased case pick rates but required costly bespoke lifts and lateral slewing clamps together with steel rail guidance systems installed to reduce aisle widths. The FlexiPiCK system requires a load access aisle of only two metres, dramatically reducing the floor space footprint required.
The new FlexiPICK truck features integrated hydraulic arms that grip layers of product from within the pallet storage cube to build a new pallet of products to fulfill orders quickly and efficiently, with rubber pads to cushion the loads carried. The FlexiPiCK is a cost-effective method for suppliers to pick orders, and lets them offer wholesale and retail store clients order quantities at lower cost than case-ordered volume prices, and with less inventory commitment than full pallets of product.
Have a good month.
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