Bargain Booze slashes stock damage costs with forklift attachment16 April 2010

The store chain Bargain Booze reckons it's saving thousands of pounds a year by virtually eliminating damage caused to palletised loads by forklift trucks at its national distribution centre in Crewe.

Graham Woods, Bargain Booze's operations manager, explains that the firm operates 13 1.8- to 3.0-tonne counterbalanced trucks, as well as very narrow aisle machines and reach trucks.

Palletised loads are transferred by the counterbalanced vehicles to a marshalling area, he says, where they are collected by reach trucks and put away within the company's 22,000 pallet capacity storage system.

The NDC serves hundreds of stores, and each receives, on average, 8-9 pallets per week. With that kind of throughput and the fragile nature of its products, losses have been a problem.

Woods says the situation was exacerbated by changes in the packaging regulations, requiring businesses to recover and recycle a percentage of their packaging waste – which meant less protective packaging from suppliers.

So he ordered the fitting of Jayline Products' moulded rubber load protectors to the forks of each of its counterbalanced trucks. Now, as pallet are picked up, the protector prevents the load from hitting the truck's forks or the fork carriage with sufficient force to damage the load.

"The load protectors have saved us literally thousands of pounds," says Woods. "The return on our investment was almost instant. It is a very simple solution, but innovation does not need to be complex – and we have not seen anything like the protectors on the market that addresses the problem of palletised load damage so neatly."

Brian Tinham

Related Companies
Jayline Products Ltd

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