All change in the warehouse

Early in our meeting at Crown’s still very new and very smart premises in Basingstoke, Simon Barkworth enthuses about the changes occurring in the modern supply chain.

“I've been in the forklift business for over 20 years and there has never been the focus on the distribution centre and the supply chain there is now. 

“It’s all about speed and new challenges such as dealing with the last mile. We are seeing clients investing very heavily in their distribution and seeking to make very significant leaps in efficiency. 

“It’s exciting times, if you’re not thrilled to be in business now, you never will be. This is also a great opportunity to attract talented youngsters to the industry.”

The fast changing logistics landscape has rewarded Crown’s innovations. Perhaps most notable of these is the InfoLink fleet management system.

“We’ve been selling forklifts for decades, and we had to sell a little differently. The whole fleet management piece has set us apart from other suppliers. We were putting a different proposal on the table - and the response of the key buyers was ‘this works for us’.”

Crown was a pioneer in forklift fleet management and this brings a number of real benefits. Not only has Crown ironed out many of the initial difficulties that inevitably emerge when rolling out software to an environment where it has not been prominent, it now has a significant installed base and a huge well of data to draw upon.

Simon explains: “We've had the product out there, built into our trucks, for over 10 years and we have thousands of units in the market place. It's a mature product now. We know it's well received because customers stick with it, it becomes the centre of their warehouse operation from a daily check perspective to monitoring truck utilisation.”

The software helps customers with warehouse environments that reconfigure regularly, think 3PLs. As an operation may switch between cross-docking and pallet storage, or carrying out greater or fewer high lifts, InfoLink picks up the impact on forklifts and the info can be used to help managers make informed choices to best adapt the fleet to suit changing needs.

It can also be used to identify critical processes and improve daily operations. A facility may have one particular dock door that's a hot spot for damage or a traffic bottleneck. InfoLink can quantify these issues, which managers can then move to resolve.

Towards automation

Another key innovation has been the QuickPick Remote system. This low level order picking solution uses a level of automation to help the picker work more efficiently. Some retailers have seen an increase in pick efficiency of some 20%.

“We’ve had QuickPick Remote in the marketplace for six years now, with millions of hours of life out there, so it is a well proven solution.” 

This has played well as convenience retail has surged in the last decade. As consumers are now putting less emphasis on a big weekly shop, so retail distribution puts less focus on big pallet movements, with quick, agile case picking solutions showing their worth.

Simon expands on the theme: “There’s a growth, not necessarily in automation, but with a view to building up to automation. There's been a shift in attitude. 

“Our step into that area has been with the VNA product with APS (Auto Positioning System) and it's very much a scalable solution, and as the WMS becomes more developed, for instance, it can be further scaled up.

“QuickPick Remote is a dual mode answer and is very easy to implement in an existing infrastructure. A lot of automation requires massive change in infrastructure which can be prohibitive from a cost perspective. So there's certainly a big place for easy wins for dual mode and semi-automation. We are definitely expecting growth in these as well as the fully automated fork truck area,” says Simon

He adds that a significant challenge with semi-automated trucks is that expensive sensors such as lasers get knocked about by drivers. Crown has designed these expensive items to be more integrated into and protected by the truck design.

“We put the sensors higher up on the truck away from the main impact areas, and we will put them in steel housing. We won’t put expensive laser sensors under plastic housing.”

Lithium-ion

A further development for Crown has been lithium-ion ready electric trucks. This is now growing to encompass a broader range of forklifts. 

“It is very much a growing subject in the material handling market. We provide lithium-ion preparation on our full range of 24 volt and 48 volt products. So, it’s very much integrated in what we do. It's not just a battery pack that goes in a truck,” says Simon.

“It provides great benefits but it requires a culture change. Opportunity charging is a no-no with lead acid batteries, but it’s optimal for lithium-ion, so an established warehouse practice is turned on its head, and that has to be managed well. Our satisfied customers show that it has really taken off this year.”

Bespoke

Crown also specialises in developing bespoke kit and is taking a lot of direction from big customers, who increasingly want equipment tailored to their operation.

One such truck I saw at Basingstoke was a low level order picker, with a platform allowing the operator to be elevated to 1.8m. Little touches include that safety gates around the operator platform open and close automatically to save time.

The truck features two storage trays for the picker, and double size forks to allow two pallets of goods to be picked on a run.

The pallets were built with pallet collars, because the pickers were storing loose loads on the truck.

“The responsiveness of the design team won this order, and we’ve since sold this product to other clients with similar challenges,” explains Simon.

Conclusion

With such strong production innovation, coupled with reliability, it is little wonder that Crown has experienced rapid UK growth in the recent years.

“Since we came out of the recession Crown had invested massively in product development, and with the changing market post-recession, it was the right time for us to make a real impact in the UK.

“We have made significant progress in the UK in recent years and we have had a number of key wins in the marketplace which has made the market take notice. Fleet management with our InfoLink product has been a huge driver for us, and retail distribution has been a particularly successful sector for us.

“We’re happy to see significantly growing market shares in the past years. The very competitive market since the recession has suited us, as suppliers have to offer something different, and we have been able to rise to the challenge.”