Picking Trolley Castors take the strain!
Cyber Monday was expected to be one of the busiest online trading days of the year, with millions of us taking to the internet to purchase our much needed Christmas presents.
Cyber Monday was expected to be one of the busiest online trading days of the year, with millions of us taking to the internet to purchase our much needed Christmas presents. Logistic warehouses and distribution centres across the country braced themselves for a fifty percent increase in transactions compared to a normal Monday trading. Major retailers now have distribution hubs, designed for internet purchases located all over the United Kingdom. For example John Lewis has a state of the art £58 million pound distribution warehouse, located in Milton Keynes in the centre of the country. Here six thousand orders were received before 6am, and the numbers just grew throughout the day to over 55,000 transactions by lunch time. In order to manage such sales, a team of staff are picking the orders, with a convoy of picking trolleys on castors.
Depending upon the volume of orders these distribution centres can have additional staff on shift at a moment’s notice. Serving internet transactions as well as stores, these massive warehouses rely on a wide variety of castors and wheels to move products, pallets, and packaging around the hub. With miles of conveyor belts running on conveyor castors and rollers, this twenty four hour, round the clock operations never stop. Castors and wheels in these environments moving all day every day require frequent checking and maintaining. Replacement castors and replacement wheels are fitted by a team of maintenance engineers in order to keep the picking trolleys on castors moving in the right direction. There is nothing worse than a caster with ‘wobble’ a bit like sticking shopping trolley wheel. This wobble affects the directional movement and smooth running of the rubber wheels, and makes the picking cycle slower. Distribution centres are designed for maximum efficiency and efficient picking of orders. Over fifty per cent of online transactions nowadays are for next day deliveries, so in order to maintain this efficient process, the picking trolleys on castors must be all up and running and on the move!
With the run up to Christmas, we have experienced an increase in sales of replacement castors, as warehouse managers and distribution centre maintenance teams require replacement castors and wheels. The most popular by far are the bolt hole grey rubber castors, as they are easily attached to trolleys, with a simple single bolt, and the grey rubber wheels are quiet and non-marking. These durable robust grey rubber castors are part of a range of castors that are used in distribution centres. Supermarkets tend to have goods shipped to stores on rack trolleys with nylon castors. These tend to be the hardest wearing wheels, and can withstand the large number of deliveries and movements one rack trolley goes through in its lifetime. Pallet castors are a popular choice for bulk storage of items and products, and the largest of containers, can also have container castors attached, for ease of movement. So with so many transactions both online and in store, distribution warehouses take the train on their casters and wheels.
