Bowker Group, one of the UK’s largest independent third party logistics (3PL) service operators, has added a fleet of five new Flexi articulated warehouse trucks at its facility in York.
The introduction of the new trucks means that Bowker now operates in excess of 20 articulated trucks across its sites at Preston, Hull, Droitwich, Knowsley, Ripon, York and Selby.
Founded in 1919, Bowker has a diverse client base and stores and distributes anything from hazardous chemicals to food stuffs and throughout the business the company has standardised on narrow aisle storage served by Flexi articulated trucks.
Manufactured in the UK by Narrow Aisle, Flexis delivers space and throughput-efficient intralogistics solutions and, because they can be used both inside a store and outside to unload incoming trailers and deliver pallets directly to the racking, they eliminate the need for double handling.
In each of Bowker’s sites an integrated battery charging system ensures that the electric-powered Flexis operate at optimum efficiency. The system features the latest ‘call-forward’ alert technology to identify the most appropriate fully-charged battery for the truck operator to select when a change is due. This means that batteries often last for up to 12 hours between charges, which extends the life of the cells and dramatically reduces Bowker’s overall energy consumption and, therefore, operating costs.
To ensure optimum Flexi truck uptime at each of Bowker’s facilities, Narrow Aisle is providing a complete fleet management and maintenance support package.
“Companies strive to be as lean as possible and the days when businesses kept ‘surplus’ equipment on site are gone, so downtime resulting from any maintenance required is likely to have a significant impact on a user’s operation,” commented Narrow Aisle’s commercial director, John Maguire.
He continued: “This makes it essential to proactively schedule preventative maintenance work to suit Bowker’s needs – thus ensuring minimum disruption to the day-to-day running of the business.
“By maintaining a thorough maintenance regime we will ensure the optimum performance of every truck within Bowker’s fleet throughout its lifecycle and deliver on-going operating cost efficiencies which will have a direct impact on Bowker’s bottom line.”
