New load recovery access system developed

To enable further expansion, The Weetabix Food Company decided to invest in a state of the art pallet warehouse. TGW was awarded the design and integration of this warehouse solution.

From its base in the heart of the English countryside, The Weetabix Food Company has been creating breakfast cereals since 1932. The business has expanded significantly since its creation and the company now employs over 2,000 people around the world. The Weetabix range of breakfast cereals isn't just popular in the UK - they export to over 80 countries, from the Middle East and South America to Europe and South East Asia.

To free up space within the warehouse complex at the Weetabix headquarters in Burton Latimer, Northamptonshire, and to reduce the number of pallets currently held in off site storage, the company decided to invest in an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS). TGW designed and integrated the new automated warehouse solution into the existing operation.

TGW designed a cost effective solution for Weetabix, where the pallets are conveyed and handled two pallets high, to optimise throughput and space. There are 22,000 pallet locations in the warehouse, serviced by three highly dynamic fully automatic TGW Magnus pallet handling cranes, supplying multiple pallet deep storage tubes with the TGW Muli satellite vehicles. This new solution allows for a performance of storing and retrieving approximately 200 loads per hour.

"We have designed and developed a new load recovery access system for this type of application," says Philip Steeds, sales director of TGW. "It allows safe access for qualified operators into the storage tubes to recover a failed or damaged load and can also be deployed in support of the maintenance and health and safety activity. The Magnus & Muli is used to deploy and recover the access cages into and from these storage tubes." The solution will be integrated in the existing facilities at Weetabix' headquarters in Burton Latimer.

To allow the current operations to continue while the new solution was installed, TGW phased the installation works and coordinate every step with the existing operations. From November 2010 the new warehouse solution has supplied customers around the world with the Weetabix Family of Brands.

Damian Magill, chief engineer at Weetabix says: "The design is very robust, showing really good performance from a utilisation point of view.We have maximised footprint by use of the intelligent Muli system and taken the available pallet storage from circa 12k to 22k within the same footprint, a very siginificant increase.

"A key health & safety benefit is minimising truck movements through the space, reducing the risk of accidents."