technologyreseller.co.uk 09 DISTRIBUTION Continued... product. We can also do added-value services in terms of asset tagging, memory upgrades, Autopilot and imaging for our customers,” explains Chief Logistics Officer Sion Wineyard. The warehouse operates seven days a week, on a 24-hour basis from Monday to Friday. It has a permanent workforce of 330, supported by temporary workers who swell the workforce to 650 during the busiest times of the year. To minimise its carbon footprint, Exertis has installed energy-saving, motionactivated LED lighting; 14 EV chargers for use by Exertis, staff and visitors; and a 65,000 square foot array of 3,000 solar panels on the roof. This generates 40% of the NDC’s annual electricity consumption, enough to power 210 homes for a year, with any excess exported to the national grid. The array reduces Exertis’s carbon emissions by 450 tonnes per year, adding up to 11,000 tonnes over the array’s 25year lifespan. Attention to detail Everything about the NDC is on a very large scale, but its operational excellence is based on attention to the minutest detail. This includes breaking down its core activities – receipt, processing and despatch – into distinct steps. On an average day, these add up to 50,000 individual tasks, giving each worker 130 to complete per shift. Or, as Wineyard put it, “50,000 is the number of steps in our dance”. The 24-hour day is broken down into three periods of eight hours: Receipt (6am to 2pm); Processing & Despatch (2pm to 10pm); and Stock Replenishment and Retailer Fulfilment (10pm to 6am). On an average day, 90 articulated lorries will deliver 650 pallets and 550 SKUs to the NDC (rising to 1,300 pallets and 800 SKUs in the October/November peak), followed by 100 collections by Pallex (for pallets) and couriers (for packages). The 32 aisles of warehouse racking, each 100 metres long and 16 metres high, can accommodate 31,000 pallets. Workers pick stock using 42 low-level order pickers and 16 VNA (very narrow aisle) trucks that can reach items on the top tiers of racking. Pick Tower The size of the NDC warehouse brings its own inefficiencies – just think of those five football pitches and the ground staff must cover in carrying out those 50,000 tasks. Hence the Pick Tower investment. Essentially a giant cage with 51,500 storage locations and 72 pick zones spread across four levels and 25,000 square feet, this secure, restricted facility reduces manual processing and touchpoints, as well as distances travelled when picking stock. This is important as 55% of dropship orders are received in the with Microsoft which they’ve been pushing for some time, and our digital bundling capability allows us to do that.” Of the 1.8 million dropship orders to date, involving 19,000 different products from 250 brands, 157,000 have been bundles. Exertis NDC By any measure, the NDC at Burnley Bridge is an impressive facility. Opened seven years ago as the primary distribution centre for Exertis’s Retail and B2B businesses, it replaced the company’s existing campus in the area, which at its peak had seven warehouses, with one enormous space offering state-of-theart technology, sophisticated security, e.g. automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) and biometric access control, plus additional capacity to support future growth and efficiencies. Only last month, Exertis opened a consultation period to consider a proposal to close its warehouse and distribution facility in Raunds and move operations to Burnley Bridge. Exertis also has warehouses in Elland, Leeds (Supplies), Lambourn (Hypertec memory and accessories) and Basingstoke, but Burnley Bridge is comfortably its largest distribution centre in the UK and Exertis is confident that from FY2025 it will be able to warehouse and distribute all stock from that one location. The 550,000 square foot building took 18 months to build using 20,000 tonnes of concrete and 40,000 tonnes of steel. The actual warehouse has a footprint of 460,000 square foot – the size of five football pitches – with planning permission for a further 200,000 square feet should it be needed. It rises to a height of 22 metres, with a workable height of 18.8 metres, higher than a stack of four double-decker buses. Eighteen months ago, Exertis added a 120,000 square foot mezzanine floor within the existing footprint, providing additional working space including 60,000 square feet dedicated to returns processing and manufacturer-accredited testing. “Within the facility, we have a 7,500 square foot Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) service centre, so we can offer our vendors full test capability in terms of return Sion Wineyard
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