Rossmann’s central warehouse in Hungary operates a fleet of warehouse trucks from Toyota Material Handling Hungary, including 27 BT Optio OSE250 low-level order pickers.

Rossmann is a pharmacy chain, selling pharmaceutical and cosmetics products. A German family business, it is currently the second largest company of its kind in Hungary. The Hungarian subsidiary has been operating since 1993, when it opened three shops. In 2010 there were almost 200 outlets across Hungary.
István Bernula, is logistics manager of Rossmann Hungary, responsible for running the central warehouse and managing centralised deliveries, “This central warehouse supplies 95% of a typical store’s stock. We are in Üllő, about 15 km from Budapest, and placed in a good, central location. The warehouse area is 24,500m² and has 18,000 pallet positions above the ground level. We also have about 7,000 ground level positions for order picking.”  

This facility was opened in September 2009. Before that Rossmann operated from three locations, but merging has led to Rossmann improving its material handling processes and real productivity improvements.

“Incoming goods are all palletised – about 400 daily. We use, however, roll cages for order picking and despatch, which enable easier load handling, especially at the store end. Every day some 600 roll cages will be despatched to our shops.

“We have various types of forklift in our fleet. The key machines are our eight BT Reflex reach trucks and 27 BT OSE250 low-level order picking trucks. 17 of these trucks have long forks for handling two Europallets (or three roll cages) at a time.

“When specifying the BT OSE250s, we required that the truck fork length and the width over the forks had to be adapted to our roll cages, which means that the forks are closer together than a standard forklift truck. The truck forks also had to be long enough to handle three cages at a time. Toyota Material Handling Hungary was readily able to meet this demand.

Another key feature of the BT OSE250 for us is the truck’s E-man steering. The control handle of this forklift can be set towards the side of the truck, which is useful for two reasons. Firstly, it helps the operator ‘walk the truck’ alongside himself when he is moving between adjacent picking locations. Secondly, it helps when travelling in the fork direction to have the control towards the side. Because the operator is essentially facing away from it, it is more comfortable to reach in that position.

“We also have BT Staxio SWE100 and SWE120 pedestrian powered stackers for the separation of stacked pallets, and many powered pallet trucks, including 12 BT Levio LPE200s. Finally an LPG-powered Toyota Tonero 8FGF15 counterbalance forklift truck for outdoor pallet storage.

Rossmann, Hungary has been working with BT and Toyota for some 14 years. “We started with a few forklifts but we now operate almost 30 BT and Toyota forklift trucks,” István Bernula continues. We have used trucks from other manufacturers but we always prefer BT and Toyota for many reasons – not only technical, but also cost. Toyota Material Handling Hungary has also supplied the racking for this warehouse.

“In addition, the service agreement offered by Toyota is also very favourable. It covers all regular maintenance, so every three or six months, depending on machine type, BT technicians carry out unscheduled forklift repairs, if necessary. They always arrive quickly and aim to fix the problem there and then. If the repair takes longer, they are flexible in supplying a replacement forklift truck in the meantime.

“I think our relationship with BT is prospering. We get all the support and help we need. In an ideal world we would have no downtime due to machine failure, but in the real world we are certainly able to operate thanks to Toyota Material Handling. I think that their team absolutely supports our material handling operations and we are very happy with the relationship.”