sara LBS: The benefits Of a load house to your business

Can sara LBS Loading Houses help you to beat the Tax Man and energy prices?

Making a decision on a loading/unloading installation at your premises might seem simple, given that the functional requirements are clearly defined and the goals straightforward. But as Tony Saunders, national sales manager at Sara LBS, explains, that decision can have space, heating, weather protection and even tax implications.

How effectively you get goods into and out of your warehouse or plant can have a big impact on efficiency and, ultimately, on profitability. The ability to load or unload directly onto scissor lifts or dock levellers can contribute greatly to logistics efficiency; eliminating bottle-necks for incoming and outgoing goods.

In looking at a loading/unloading installation at a warehouse, a first thought might simply be to back the vehicle right up to the building, with the dock leveller installed inside at the interface. And certainly at many premises this will do the job nicely.

A key problem with this arrangement tends to be the valuable warehouse space that the scissor lift or dock leveller takes up. If you don’t have the available space for an optimised loading/unloading solution, then your operation is necessarily compromised. Or, if you have to rethink your warehouse layout to accommodate the unloading technology, are you compromising efficiency elsewhere in the logistics operation?

A further issue can be heat loss – or indeed heat ingress where you are trying to maintain a cooler temperature. Every time the loading bay doors are opened, it is potentially costing you money. Despite falling oil prices of late, energy bills across industry seem to have moved only minimally, and long term the trend is almost certain to be upwards.

Further, there is the issue of protecting the inside of the warehouse from inclement weather conditions. Keeping out the wind and rain typical of our changeable British weather is an on-going challenge; one that can negatively impact on goods, but can also have implications for safety, hygiene and more.

Dock shelters and seals offer an effective solution for maintaining efficiency and protecting against adverse weather in warehouses with internal loading/unloading bays. By forming a seal around the vehicle the warehouse is protected from the outside environment. However, this solution doesn’t completely seal off the warehouse from exposure and operators should be aware temperature regulation will still be compromised.

A second alternative is to look at an extension to the warehouse, adding a separate loading area attached to the premises to meet the vehicle. This has the big advantage that no valuable space inside the warehouse is lost, and that can have the greatest impact on the overall efficiency of the logistics operation. Further, separately insulated and with a door at either end, the extension can make it much easier to maintain energy efficiency. In effect, the extension becomes a temperature controlled ‘airlock’, and it’s much more energy efficient to control the temperature within a small extension than having to compensate for an open door in a huge warehouse.

The same dock shelters and seals at the extension/vehicle interface again contribute to maintaining energy efficiency and protecting the interior – and indeed the goods themselves – from the climatic conditions.

Perhaps the biggest issue with an extension to the warehouse, though, is the impact on the rateable value of the premises. Business rates have been with us since the 1600s, and are often one of the largest financial outgoings a business has to bear. With a rating revaluation planned for 2017, any physical extension to the warehouse could have significant financial implications. Certainly this has to be factored into the viability of an extension to the building versus keeping the loading/unloading fully within the warehouse.

There is, however, a third option, and that is the use of dock loading pods, also referred to as loading houses. These form an external loading dock enclosure which can be installed directly onto the face of the building. As the integrated dock leveller is external to the warehouse, no valuable internal space is lost.

A typical dock loading pod, such as supplied by Sara LBS, provides a rigid or retractable seal between the pod and the vehicle, providing weather protection, hygiene and safety. A sealed door to the existing warehouse access helps to ensure heat/chill loss is minimised at all times, and in most cases the pod doesn’t require heating or chilling to the same temperature as the inside, saving on energy costs.

Most importantly, the dock loading pod is not taken into consideration when business rates are calculated, so the pod can offer big savings in tax when compared to a physical building extension. And if the business moves to new premises, the dock loading pod can be disassembled and relocated as required, protecting the investment in the asset.

Sara LBS supplies purposed-designed dock loading pods which provide complete self-contained units, with minimal construction requirements. The design reduces construction time on-site, and because they are installed independently of any building work, other operations inside the building are not affected, minimising the impact on day-to-day activities.

Wall panels are insulated to 40mm as standard up to 120mm, with U-values from 0.58W/m2K up to 0.20W/m2K. Insulated roof panels help to maintain thermal efficiency, and the pods are usually supplied with either an insulated sectional overhead door or an insulated roller shutter to minimise heat loss.

So when you come to consider the best loading/unloading technology to enable goods to be unloaded to or loaded from your warehouse, there is more to think about than you might have guessed. Where you don’t want to lose valuable internal space, and where the construction costs, tax considerations and asset investment protection implications come into play, the dock loading pod could well represent a highly attractive proposition.

sara lbs

Tel: 01442 245577

Email: info@saralbs.co.uk

www.saralbs.co.uk