Whether you are a growing small business with a single, faithful forklift truck or a national distribution centre with a fleet of specialist order pickers servicing narrow aisles and tall racking, your requirements for material handling equipment are specific to you. Briggs has helped all types of businesses using its asset management tools and comprehensive customer support service but few compare to the scale and intensive demands of the Port of Tilbury.
Port of Tilbury is London’s major port and operates on such a large scale it needs its own on-site, resident engineers to ensure the continual running of vital equipment. Briggs Equipment is able to offer a 3 hour response time to breakdowns thanks to its nationwide fleet of service engineers, however the expectations of a busy port are even more immediate and the Port remains one of the company’s longest standing examples of providing a resident team to help a customer achieve their productivity goals.
Based on the River Thames, Port of Tilbury handles 16 million tonnes of cargo each year. The 1,100 acre site primarily handles containers, ro-ro, wood, paper, recycled products and grain. The Port is a multi-modal hub that employs over 3,500 people and is a significant contributor to the local and UK economy. With such a range of products passing through the port, handling equipment goes beyond specialist and has to be bespoke. In turn, a service to support and maintain such machinery also has to be bespoke.
Briggs Equipment has supplied the materials handling equipment, engineering team and the tools to manage the vast fleet of diverse trucks since 2002.
Such a long standing relationship between Port of Tilbury and Briggs is testament to a unique service, quality products and Briggs’ integral support from within the Port to ensure productivity never drops.
A complex environment like Port of Tilbury has very specialist requirements that are encountered in few other workplaces. The scale of operation is unlike any other. From the moving and storing of vast quantities of items including reels of paper weighing up to 7T along with the movement of freight containers and the logistical issues involved in time sensitive processes makes the Port a complex and demanding project for any asset management partner.
The varied cargo that the Port handles day to day has differing requirements such as paper reels that need to be moved quickly but without damage and freight containers that differ in dimension and capacity and therefore require differing attachments to lift them. Any handling equipment has to be hard wearing, reliable and used in the most effective way.
The Port previously operated with over 200 handling vehicles but had suffered from extensive downtime due to age, inefficient use and ongoing breakdowns. Taking over the contact for Port of Tilbury in 2002, Briggs Equipment was able to respond to these historic challenges. Initially a full logistics study was completed to establish the correct fleet requirements in terms of size, specification and age profile. Sales and Operations Manager Andrew Bellamy, with 34 years’ experience in the materials handling industry, was instrumental in these processes and today manages the whole contract. He assesses best practice, advises on cost effective solutions to practical problems, monitors machinery and heads up a team of 20 resident engineers to ensure vital equipment is maintained to deliver maximum productivity.
By having a new and unique type of service that is embedded on site, Andrew Bellamy has been able to swap ageing machines for new bespoke equipment that was capable of greater productivity with less cost. With his ongoing input and support, the Port and Briggs were able to run as a team rather than a traditional supplier and customer relationship.
Today, the fleet at Port of Tilbury has expanded as the port’s business has grown to over 300 pieces of equipment. With specialist heavy duty equipment and an onsite manager to oversee operations, Briggs introduced the pioneering BE Portal to help monitor and maintain the fleet.
BE Portal is an online fleet management system that reports on machine usage across a department or down to an individual truck. Information available includes downtime, repair costs, usage hours and with the support of Briggs, helps the customer make the best use of every truck, reassigning resource to avoid costs relating to out of contract hours and making sure that servicing schedules are met so performance is optimised.
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