Linde Material Handling and Britvic Soft Drinks found a refreshing solution when Britvic’s national distribution center in Leicester was looking to replace its current fleet of order pickers and counterbalance trucks.
Britvic Soft Drinks is one of Europe’s leading branded soft drinks businesses. With great brands like Robinsons, J2O, Tango and Fruit Shoot, and exclusive agreements to bottle and distribute global brands including Pepsi and 7UP on behalf of PepsiCo, Britvic are dedicated to creating and building brands that delight consumers.
The national distribution centre operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and has circa 150 employees including third party employees based at the site. They boast a fleet of ten Linde N20 order pickers and seven H35 LPG IC counterbalance trucks. The N20’s are used for case picking in the warehouse and the H35’s transport goods in and out of the centre in full pallet picks and transfer them to, as many as, 250 lorries a day.
The H35’s are set up with double pallet handlers enabling them to manage two pallets at a time to improve efficiencies when loading and unloading pallets from the side of the arctic lorry trailers to and from the automated palletised warehouse. With the benefits of the Linde engine range we were able to offer a 3.5 tonne truck, as opposed to replacing their 4.0 tonne fleet, whilst still achieving the lifting capacity required.
Ryan Walton, Pallet and MHE Lead at Britvic, said: “The trucks are far more comfortable for the operators during long shifts and they are significantly quieter making the warehouse a more pleasant environment for the all the warehouse staff to work in. The new fleet has also led to cost savings with a reduction in the amount of fuel consumed. We have also seen a reduction in damage in the loading bays as the smaller trucks have more maneuvering space.”
Britvic carried out their own tests on fuel savings with the new truck against their existing supplier and although the Linde tank was 15 litres smaller it still lasted longer than the current supplier providing expected savings of up to £29,000 a year.
Ryan concluded “The significant 14% fuel savings each year together with the reduction in our carbon footprint – 15 tonnes of CO2 per year – means the new fleet of trucks from Linde are a valuable asset to our business”.
Comments are closed.