Dreaming of rubber sided warehousing?
A warehouse manager for one of Britain’s leading household DIY stores sighed, and said ‘what I need is a rubber sided warehouse’. He was facing a delivery of three lorries from a logistics provider, bearing stock which had to be stored the next day. Robert Alvarez of De Boer takes up the story.
Ultimate flexibility is what every logistics provider wants. It’s also what every warehouse manager needs and is an especially relevant subject as Easter is the earliest it can ever be according to the church calendar this year, with Good Friday falling on March 25th 2016.
For many in logistics, Easter is actually a busier time than Christmas and it is also a time with notoriously variable weather, a key driver of customer demand and therefore warehouse space.
“Weather has had a greater effect [on sales] than economic numbers, we’ve known that forever” – Andy Street, John Lewis Managing Director, 2014
For this reason it can be especially difficult to have the appropriate amount of warehouse space available. Clearly it’s not cost effective to have empty space waiting, just to be ready for six weeks of the year around Easter, while renting additional space on a short term let can be costly too, and complicated.
Effective and immediate
A solution is to erect a temporary structure. Many warehouse managers are not familiar with just how robust and secure this option can be, imagining a building which is, quite literally, rubber-sided.
The reality is a steel or aluminium framed structure of up to 4,000 square metres; sides made of solid panels; a ceiling high enough to accommodate heavy goods vehicles and loading bays; all electrics and plumbing in place, and an integral floor system (if required) that can handle pallet trucks and other such materials handling machinery smoothly to provide a pick and pack area. This extra warehouse space can be erected in days, without any laborious estate agency or property rental arrangements which can themselves take weeks to arrange and even longer to conclude.
The space to site this temporary strcture can be found conveniently close to the existing warehousing, for example it can often be accommodated within a marshalling yard or warehouse grounds following a traffic work flow analysis, allowing vehicle movements to be analysed and planned. This gives the benefits of shared staff, no additional transport costs and shared on-site security.
De Boer is probably better known for providing temporary structures at high profile, high footfall sites such as the Chelsea Flower Show or the Farnborough Air Show. However it is clear that a temporary building which can accommodate a commercial aircraft could also comfortably house retail goods; and one that is designed specifically to ensure that thousands of plants and people can breathe, can also provide the perfectly managed environment for short term delicate stock items.
Temporary structures such as the JumboHall (30m, 40m or 50m clear span and extendable in bays of 5m) which De Boer provides are now being used across the country to give flexible, seasonal, storage space. Although they are temporary they can actually stay in place for many years, or can be installed on your site annually to reflect the needs of your business. In this case, reusable anchors can be installed in concrete to allow the swift and efficient erection and dismantling of the structure in the same place, as seasonal pressures come and go.
A temporary structure of 30m x 140m with reusable anchors and an integrated loading canopy for double-deck trailers was exactly the solution provided for the warehouse manager who wanted rubber-sided warehousing – so for him, at least, his warehouse dreams came true.
