The only way is UP at VBH Swansea

Drastic changes to customers’ ordering patterns are said to have given rise to some head scratching at VBH’s sales and distribution centre in Swansea recently.

The Swansea centre serves VBH’s customers in Wales and South West England, and it had become apparent that more stock needed to be held locally to help react most efficiently to the requirements of customers whose hardware uptake had rapidly increased or, in some cases, had become erratic.

The focus was to ensure that sales orders from Welsh and South Western customers in 2022 and beyond would be supplied complete first time from Swansea, without the need to ship part orders from other VBH sites.

Floor area was at maximum capacity so Dave Prout, VBH operations manager – Swansea, and his team decided that the only way was up!

They designed and installed high level picking spaces and pallet racking to take full advantage of the building height.

The re-design has allowed for a deeper stock holding of VBH Swansea’s most popular lines, including those from the greenteQ brand, and has created an extra 120 pallet spaces with no loss of picking shelves for smaller, slower moving products.

As part of the warehouse upgrade VBH have also invested in a new high-level order picker to be used in the narrow aisle design layout. The picker is capable of reaching all levels of racking and is computer guided to allow for safe working in narrow aisles.

Dave said: “The whole changeover was carried out in just two weeks and we are happy to say that disruption to the depot’s customers was kept to an absolute minimum. In fact, we are very proud to say we never missed one consignment throughout the whole process.”