Operations Director at MMP Deeside, David Whitworth, explains: “When we purchased the plant in 2021, we invested in several areas of automation. However, we still faced a labour-intensive process of transporting finished goods from the factory to our nearby warehouse, which ran the risk of bottlenecks and inhibited our capacity to scale.”
The plant operates 24/7, producing high volumes of packaging transported to the warehouse on pallets. The warehouse is only a quarter of a mile away, but continually loading and unloading the pallets onto the trailers was very time-consuming. Typically, it would take one hour to load each trailer and then another hour to unload.
“Each pallet delivered into the loading bay at the end of its track would need to be manually scanned and then loaded onto the trailer using a forklift truck,” David says. “One forklift driver would process one pallet at a time until the trailer was full.”
As a result, forklifts were driven in and out of the factory every few minutes. The drivers had limited visibility entering and exiting through the factory door, so, for safety reasons, only one trailer could be loaded at a time.
“Once the trailer was full, it would be driven to the warehouse, where a forklift driver would unload each pallet from the trailer, scan it, and place it into storage,” David adds.
