Logistics Planning Blogs - LPC International

Following on from LPC’s Blueprinting design of future depots, SAB had been experiencing widespread growth and had identified that a series of new depots were required in addition to re-engineering some existing depots in order to support the ever growing network.

Rich’s Corporation of South Africa was enjoying strong growth and were challenged with insufficient storage on their production site and would therefore need to increase their contract with a third party for additional offsite storage. 

They therefore wanted to investigate the option of building their own frozen distribution centre in the near vicinity of their production site in Johannesburg.

RasGas were expanding their production facilities at Ras Laffan and had identified a need to expand their spares operation to support more production facilities as they were commissioned. In addition to this RasGas planned to move existing chemical and gas stores and build two new chemical stores and a new warehouse as a stand-alone extension.

LPC were asked to review and validate the design of Pick ‘n Pay’s new Western Cape DC, though under construction at the time, we were required to identify what racking layout and profiles we would employ, identify and comment on any issues we noted and to superimpose a “vanilla” concept onto the site to show what we would have designed based on European best practice. This would then allow a gap analysis to be carried out and the learnings to be available for future new Distribution Centres.

LPC were asked to validate plans for a Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) Distribution Centre where a site had been earmarked with a prepared concept design. The brief was to:

• Analyse the design of the KZD Distribution Centre

• Analyse, optimise and sign off the basic design configuration and layouts to be used for the construction and fit-out of the Distribution Centre

• To ensure that the final design is flexible enough to meet changing needs on the business and to be able to adapt to the potential changes and scenarios at minimal capital outlay

• To ensure that the designs allow the Distribution Centre to be institutional in respect of its flexibility to allow the business the opportunity to utilise the building for business change, and to position other supply chain functions within the building.

Receiving and dispatch takes place from a small yard between the two main adjacent buildings.

LPC were engaged to provide a flexible solution to accommodate bulk and packed product sugar product. The design required the incorporation of best practice standards, taking into consideration operational practices found in other parts of the world for the market sector and meeting food quality safety HACCP compliance standards.