LPC International has a long standing history of working with Unilever and were the validation and supporting designs undertaken for the two Mother Warehouses at Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg.

One of the key design considerations was to determine a structural warehouse grid that was flexible to allow a change of storage from Wide Aisle Racking to Very Narrow Aisle Racking or Shuttle Racking in the future.

South Africa is a fast emerging market and Unilevers’ warehousing facilities were experiencing pressure in storage capacity. Following a whole supply chain review Unilever established a need for two new distribution facilities –Mother Warehouses – in Johannesburg and Durban.

Unilever South Africa engaged LPC to analyse and validate the conceptual designs of the two proposed Mother Warehouses (MWH).

Unilever Boksberg is a laundry product, washing powder, factory site shipping to the Mother Warehouses in Johannesburg and Durban for storage and onward distribution.

Finished palletised product was held in block stack two pallets high in a pre-despatch staging area. This area was to be made available to accommodate the additional planning for some direct customer deliveries with the aim of reducing handling and transport costs. To achieve this, and with a secondary aim of increasing network storage capacity the facility required significantly more palletised storage capacity.

LPC’s approach was to concentrate on the operation, determine the requirements and objectives, optimise the solution and then consider how the building envelope can be altered or extended to accommodate the operation.

LPC started the project with the mapping of the processes, material flows and identifying the requirements at each stage in both production and packing. All of the processes employed were reviewed in terms of function, resource and space requirements. The material flows were sized by unit load moved and overall cube. The existing volumes and throughputs were then uplifted to take account of anticipated growth and future demands over the design horizon which the client had identified. The optimal material flows were then calculated and plotted to minimise movement and handling.

 
Project Overview

The project was to investigate the feasibility of designing and building a central production and logistics facility to supply baked goods to the Oman / UAE region.

 
The bulk capacity review was undertaken in two ways:

•By a site search of warehouses of suitable size in and around Aylesbury
•By looking to expand on the existing site

The most cost effective solution was to extend the existing warehouse by means of a “temporary” building, saving in construction costs and transport and handling of stock to and from a remote site.

SETCO serve the major sectors of economic activity in Kuwait: Manufacturing, Oil & Gas, Petrochemicals, Contracting, Municipal Utility Plants and Commercial Facilities. Their products and services are delivered to customers through two business units.