Going further to optimise space

A key product for the company in recent years is the much lauded Mini Bendi, which saves warehouse space, increases shop floor selling space and frees up congestion in the pedestrian pick area.

The Mini Bendi is used by ASDA, as Simon Grass, Asda back of house development manager, explains: "Asda have had a significant involvement in the development of the Mini Bendi and we now have a truck that offers greater flexibility as well as efficiency and productivity benefits compared to other types of handling equipment.”

As a business, Asda looks for ways to separate pedestrians and forklift trucks in order to minimise the risk of accidental collisions. However when segregated it could often lead to usage and productivity becoming inefficient, but as Simon explains, they no longer need to compromise.

"The Mini Bendi allows us to significantly drive the use of the cube in our back of house areas as it can work in the narrow aisle format and maximise the usable height available, but due to its way of working, that allows us to have pedestrian pick within the same area permitting the stores to drop and fill effectively.

"This supports the reduction in the building footprint and thus improves the buildings selling efficiency as we can either build a smaller store or increase the selling square footage. It also allows us to lower the height of the building as we can now store as many pallets above ‘pedestrian pick’ in narrow aisles, as we could in the reach truck aisles at height, which is especially welcomed by the local planning authorities in certain areas of the country.”

It is not just new stores that benefit from the Mini Bendi. When Asda review one of their more established stores within the estate the Mini Bendi can save significant space, time and money in the back of house areas as Asda can reduce the capital spend on re-aligning the warehouses to segregate colleagues and for lifts. This is because the Mini Bendi can perform the same tasks as many of the existing reach trucks within the estate so Asda can simply swap them over and the area becomes pedestrian friendly.

Order picker

With the demand for next-day deliveries now becoming the norm, customers are moving a larger proportion of their available floor space over to picking rather than bulk storage.

Bendi MD Simon Brown says: "While most picking operations are carried out with great efficiency, there remains a sticking point when an order picker picking at ground level reaches an empty pallet location. The operative will put out a call for the reach truck to bring down a pallet from the second level, which interrupts the picking process and causes unnecessary delays or missed picks.”

It was here that the idea for an articulated order picking truck was born.

The Bendi Order Picker can pick like any other stand-on order picker but it is the first truck that is designed to do "self replenishment”.

The Bendi Order Picker has two pallet handling locations and as such the operator can pick and replenish a location without having to call another machine for assistance or multi handle the picking pallet to get the replenishment pallet. As no other replenishment trucks are required, the Bendi can take advantage of its aisle performance allowing two great benefits:

• A near 50% reduction in the wasted aisle space.

• A more efficient order picking route.

Traditionally as aisles are circa 3m wide, order pickers either spend their time zigzagging from side to side or they pick up one side and down the other. This has necessitated the need for two trucks to pass in the aisle as no one machine could do all the work in one aisle and blocking it off for one or other of the functions is too slow and time consuming.