14 March 2024

“As a distributor, we pride ourselves on delivering a consistently great service to ensure that our customers get the products they want, in excellent condition, at the right time. We’ve been doing this successfully for over 100 years,” said Sam Baldwin, Mayflex operations & services director. “Technology in distribution has significantly moved on and with our investment in Autostore and the introduction of the 14 Maybot robots, we can enhance our service levels further. For instance, our accuracy rate is already high at 99.93% but our aim is to achieve 99.96%, that doesn’t sound much but over a year that equates to a large number. To ensure maximum quality, the system is designed to only deliver the product required followed by every item being scanned by our sophisticated Cognex scanners. The whole process will be far quicker to process orders, which will be particularly useful for customers ordering at the trade counter or for same day despatch requirements.

Another great feature will be the consolidation of orders, which means that customers won’t receive so many consignments in future.

“With sustainability at the heart of everything we do, the automation will also allow us to automatically choose the smallest possible outer box for each delivery, using less void filler and what’s more the boxes will be ‘crash lock boxes’ which mean we no longer need to use tape and they will be far quicker and easier for our customers to open on delivery,” said Baldwin. “Autostore is also far more energy efficient and will see a significant reduction in the power that is currently used. The installation of the project was headed up by Craig Jackson our Excel & Environ Warehouse Manager with a team made up of associates from the warehouse and IT functions. Working closely with the Swisslog the project has run extremely well taking 7 months to from start to finish. I am delighted by how the team have worked together and delivered the project on time and within budget.”