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.
LPC were engaged to conceptualise a standalone facility that would allow for the projected growth. To also make the project more viable in the shorter term this site would also be used for Rich’s to act as a Third Party Logistics provider by holding other companies’ stock and also to potentially provide satellite manufacturing food processing facilities, and a vehicle workshop.
The facility was sized to allow Rich’s Corporation room to further expand and using additional space for them to undertake third party logistics activities. The site was of a certain size that the warehouse could then be extended still further at a later date.
Various layouts and the use of different storage media such as mobile racking, shuttle racking were investigated but the most suitable, in terms of the operational requirements, flexibility and cost for their own operation and their potential clients’ was identified as conventional wide aisle double deep racking with single deep racking for the pick areas.
Temperature controlled facilities are expensive to run per cubic metre so it was essential that a high institutional standard of storage per metre floor area was achieved.
LPC provided a detailed conceptual design and client specifications for the distribution centre including storage solutions, anti-chambers, Insulated dock and dock door pod details as well as facility and site layouts.
The design took into account the sizing and migration of the chambers as more of Riche’s operation fulfilled the facility as the Third Party operation diluted.
Refrigeration plant was sized based on heat gain / loss calculations from predicted throughput volumes and were included in the budget build and fit out capex and operational costs presented to Rich’s to support their business case.
Rich’s Corporation subsequently decided not to commit to owning their own facility and to adding the new operational requirement to act as a third party operator, but to engage in an up scaled storage and distribution contract with their current third party distribution provider.
