CLASS Enables the UK’s Largest Pallet Distribution Centre to Go Live – Just as Planned!
01 June 2009
Rapid expansion at one of the UK's most successful palletised distribution networks, Palletforce, had come to mean that thousands of pallets were being handled every night through its 210,000 sq ft central hub in Staffordshire.
This involved some 200 vehicles on site each night and necessitated the careful orchestration of complex traffic movements around the warehouse in an effort to reduce queues and bottlenecks. Palletforce asked Cirrus to help it tackle two urgent projects: an assessment of the existing site traffic and warehouse flows and an analysis of management's various plans for the site expansion over the next five years. Using CLASS and many of the recent developments to the Site Traffic module, a detailed model was built up, firstly testing the efficiency of the existing operation and then the options for site development previously identified by Palletforce. In addition, the model will be employed on a day-to-day basis to help achieve on-going operational efficiencies. The strengths, as well as the weaknesses, of the operation were revealed and the options for future changes were reduced to the two strongest alternatives. Palletforce tells us that overall they found CLASS easy to use and with strong KPIs, a good communications tool and a very rapid means of simulating and understanding various options without risk to live operations.
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