It’s A Cracker!

Christmas may come but once a year but it takes a full twelve months to get the decorations ready! While we are busy sunning ourselves and making the most of the summer weather, Premier Decorations, the UK's leading provider of Christmas and festival decorations, are making sure that there will be enough festive cheer to go around when the mood takes us.

For nine months, Premier Decorations warehouse stores 45 thousand cartons of wonderful Christmas decorations from trees to lights and all manner of colourful adornments in between. The remaining three months are dedicated to shipping out the goods to retail outlets around the country and with the handling of this many items an efficient storage system is an absolute necessity.

For such a mammoth task, a mammoth storage system was needed and Redirack came to the rescue with what turned out to be our longest-ever racking installation - a full 221m long, over twice as long as the previous installation to be awarded this title!

Seventy-nine bays in length and four levels high with a top beam height of almost six and a half meters, the racking is so long that it takes almost five minutes to walk its entire length! A guarenteed way of keeping the busy workforce fit!

Logistics Operations Manager for Premier Decorations, Ron Athwal, explains about the issues facing the company: "The sheer volume of decorations we deal with throughout the year means that we need to have a very efficient storage system". Ron continues: "Although the majority of decorations we supply are for Christmas, we also supply decorations for other celebrations such as Halloween so we need to be able to identify and locate items easily and despatch them as quickly as possible".

With a run of this length, practicality was an important issue in the design so, to enable quick picks, five tunnels were created in the runs to enable the trucks to drive through into six, segregated, storage zones. The racking consists of four single and eight double runs of standard pallet racking. Wide aisles enable the scheme to be served by the reach trucks that locate and move the pallets, all of which are 1200 x 1000 x 1800mm in size.

So how many pallets locations do you think that a racking system of this length has? Well, it’s almost 12 thousand! A long, good buy!