Norish have a 45,000 sq ft cold store facility in Gillingham, Kent. The site, which is ideally located close to the M2, near London, was a strategic acquisition to provide a conveniently located comprehensive cold store service to their varied client base in London.
On taking ownership of the unit, Norish embarked on a significant upgrade of the facility.
The previous owners had operated a storage system based around very narrow aisle racking and turret trucks. Norish considered this arrangement inefficient: the turret trucks, for example, required a six metre wide transfer aisle – something that Norish’s management team quickly identified from their previous experience as a waste of valuable storage space and rather slow in operation. As a result, a new storage solution was sought.
Having successfully used both technologies in the past, Norish opted for a Powered Mobile racking warehouse system to provide maximum storage density served by Flexi Cold Store articulated trucks in aisles of only 1.8 metres, the Flexi’s allowed an extra row in each of the three chambers, providing a very useful capacity increase compared to conventional design; significantly reducing the overall ‘cost per pallet’ stored.
The site’s original configuration had provided 4,000 pallet positions in two frozen chambers operating at -25°C. Norish took the decision to create three separate frozen storage chambers each self-contained units with one access aisle in each.
The chambers were upgraded with a new floor with cast guide tracks, powered mobile racking in very narrow aisle format fed by dedicated Flexi AC 1100 CS Cold Store trucks, the Gillingham facility now offers 6,200 pallet locations – a 50 per cent increase in pallet capacity! This remarkable expansion in available pallet spaces has been achieved without extending the physical dimensions of the building.
“Within any type of cold storage facility it is essential not only to get maximum product density,” says Norman Hatcliff, managing director of Norish plc. “The combination of powered mobile racking WMS and Flexi Cold Store trucks allows us to maximise throughput, storage density and get individual pallet accessibility to ensure every location is always available for storing goods.” Many traditional systems, drive in racks, powered shuttle etc require very careful management, otherwise housekeeping costs escalate.
Products arrive at the facility throughout the whole day and are unloaded at one of five sealed loading docks by powered pallet trucks and collated within an enclosed chill marshalling area.
Full pallet loads are then collected by the Flexis and delivered directly to the mobile racking where they are put away at the position allocated by Norish’s warehouse management system. The racking is four levels high and the Flexi trucks are lifting full pallet loads to heights of 8.6 metres.
The racking is controlled using push buttons or remote control. At the touch of a button, Norish’s cold store staff are able to slide the rack structure along floor mounted guide rails to expose the required rack face within the storage cube. This means that at any one time there can be three aisles open from which pallets can be picked. This maximizes the density of storage while optimizing individual pallet access and retrieval.
“Our calculations indicate that a narrow aisle static racking system served by reach trucks would have given us less than 5000, 1200mm x 1000mm (ISO type) pallet locations,” says Norman Hatcliff. “The flexibility of the Flexi very narrow aisle articulated truck enables us to make the best use of the storage cube.”
The Flexi AC Cold Store (CS) articulated trucks in operation at Norish’s Gillingham site were specially developed to suit the cold store environment in which they work. For example, because they are spending a significant proportion of their working day in temperatures of -25 degrees or less and then transferring to ambient/chill zones, all the main components of the trucks are stainless steel or zinc coated and all other drive components cold store specified. The Flexi AC Cold Store trucks have been used by Norish at other group sites for many years, on 24 hour, 7 day shift cycles, the Flexi Cold Store battery power system is very efficient and allows only two batteries to be used to operate three shifts per day.
At present over 800 pallets pass through the Gillingham site each day, while in the run-up to Christmas the two Flexi Cold Store articulated trucks on site were still able to cope when this figure peaked at 1200 pallets in and out per day.
“Innovations we have introduced at all our facilities like Flexi Cold Store trucks means that we are making the most cost effective use of the space we have available. After all, the more pallets I can get into my warehouse the lower my operating and energy cost and the more revenue Norish can earn.”
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