By overhauling the bulk store at its NDC, the UK’s largest veterinary products wholesaler has avoided the need to acquire extra storage space, improved picking rates and made significant savings in manpower

The Veterinary Wholesaler

Founded in 1989, NVS is now the largest veterinary wholesaler in the UK, with over 460 employees and a market share in excess of 40 per cent.

The company offers 18,000 product lines ;everything that vets use on a day to day basis from washing up liquid and cans of soft drink through to flea powder, pharmaceuticals and controlled drugs. NVS delivers daily to around 1950 vets’ practices throughout the UK.

An efficient warehousing, logistics and trunking operation is at the heart of NVS’s success and the company’s UK supply chain model is based on a National Distribution Centre (NDC) near Stoke on Trent which feeds nine smaller hubs strategically located from Larkhallto Tiverton.

The materials handling and storage operation at the Stoke on Trent NDC recently underwent a major restructuring processwhich has resulted in significant improvements in picking efficiency and productivity, as well as a reduction in manpower.

“With the growth of the business we needed to look at capacities within the warehousing operation.  We recognized the bulk warehouse as an area that could be improved from an efficiency perspective.  Jungheinrich helped us to develop and implement a plan to achieve this”says Danny Roberts, NVS’s Logistics Manager.

Danny took up his current role with NVS over two years ago and joined the company at a time when available storage space at the Stoke on Trent NDC was dwindling rapidly and plans to source additional space to cope with the overflow were being reviewed.

“When I joined the business it soon became obvious to me that we were not making maximum use of our existing asset,” says Danny.

For instance, Danny found that the pallet racking within the company’s bulk store, where full pallet loads of larger items and slower moving lines are held, featuredbays of an identical height and width. This weak design resulted ina lot of wasted space and severely restricted the number of picking locations available at ground and first tier levels.

Furthermore, orders were being picked by staff directly into roll cages which they manually pulled from one picking location to the next. Following some investigation and analysis, the results showed that during a typical shift, a worker employed to pick orders in the bulk store could walk eight kilometres and might have to pull a load weighing anything up to 500 kg.

With help from Jungheinrich UK Ltd’s Systems & Projects Division, Danny undertook an extensive stock profiling process before reengineering the existing racking to offer different beam heights throughout the store based on the dimensions of the palletized loads stored. An additional 200 pallet locations were created this way.

Picking efficiency was further increased with the introduction of Jungheinrich high and low level order pickers.

The low level order pickers have reduced the need for manual handling and have resulted in faster throughput. In some cases, staff are now picking up to 33% quicker than they were using the manual system.

The introduction of the low level order pickers has also coincided with a dramatic reduction in absenteeism at the site. “Our staff’s work has become significantly less physically demanding and sickness has dropped notably as a result,” says Danny

Jungheinrich supplied NVS with a fleet of 12 EKS 110 medium level order pickers.

The EKS 110 is an ideal truck for stock-picking between the first and third levels. The platform and load section can be raised up to a height of 1000 mm which allows for picking up to a height of 2800 mm.

In addition to the low level units, Jungheinrich supplied NVS with two high level EKS 210 order pickers. The high level order pickers have taken over from reach trucks in the NVS bulk store and their introduction has brought further throughput efficiencies to the picking process.