Now's the time to build better depots
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No lack of facilities to beat unemployment
by John Darker, AMBIM
GROWING unemployment is causing increasing concern to the Department of Employment and its agency, the Manpower Services Commission, and, it is greatly to be hoped that some " work-creating " measures will be applied in the transport and distribution field.
For more than a decade, road transport managers have bewailed the generally inadequate infrastructure that provides the backcloth to day-to-day activities. While there have been many road improvements—the motorway network has proved a huge efficiency bonus to those concerned with national distribution—improvements to premises, where so many delays occur, have been lamentably few.
To be fair to the industrial customers served by road transport, some necessary improvements are difficult, or impossibly expensive. Expanding manufacturing companies often choose to move to larger, more flexible, premises rather than continue to make shift in cramped quarters conceived before road transport was a dominant factor in the economy.
But no one could deny that many small improvements designed to speed the turn-round of vehicles at industrial premises could, and should have been, made. The responsible managers lacked the imagination to realise that a failure to improve vehicle access ways, door heights, marshalling areas, road widths within their industrial site—the list could easily be extended— meant, in fact, that their transport and distribution costs were appreciably higher than they need have been.
The operators of vehicles on own-account were sometimes loath to spend money even to improve their own transport efficiency. Taken in the round, the general failure of British industry to re-plan industrial and commercial premises to cheapen distribution costs reflects harshly on the competence of management.
Yet today, with more than a million unemployed, there is no lack of facilities to set in train a massive infrastructure improvement plan. Road building may be too costly to contemplate on anything like •the scale of recent years, but the improvement of premises would not impose any burden on the balance of payments since labour is available in abundance and home-produced materials—and spare vehicles—can be used.
Heartening
These thoughts are prompted by the publication by the Architectural Press Ltd of Industrial Storage and Distribution by Peter Falconer and Jolyon Drury. Costing £20.75 (including postage and packing) the publication of this book is one of the most heartening things to have happened in a gloomy period of recession. It might have made all the difference to the "Turn that lorry round" campaign mounted by the Road Haulage Association a few years back •had the book appeared then. Its appearance is none the less welcome now.
The authors are both architects who have, for a considerable time, 'specialised in design problems of warehouses and transport depots. Architecture has developed its awn teams of specialists in recent years, but only a tiny minority of architects have bothered to specialise in •the field of distribution, despite its growing importance to the whole national economy. The authors fully realise that premises need to be studied in terms of their function; and distribution efficiency is implicit in their concept of modern industrial premises.
For this reason, Falconer and Drury have made themselves experts at mechanical handling and warehousing techniques appropriate to a whole range of specialist manufacturing processes. Before this book was published there was a large element of luck in whether new premises—however expensively designed and built—were really effective for their purpose. Any industrialist or distribution company chancing to employ an architectural practice with little or no specialist experience risked being landed with a white elephant—and there are plenty of such buildings about.
This lavishly illustrated book takes full account of the unifying of materials handling methods worldwide. While road transport men fully understand the external effects of containerisation expressed in terms of vehicles, Freightliner trains, port loading facilities, cellular container ships, etc, they may not be as aware as the authors of the compatibility requirements of pallet sizes, racking, even vehicle design parameters.
The book points out that while storage buildings are normally designed for a pay-back period of 25 years, reaching maximum efficiency at the halfway stage, it is likely that a storage and handling system may change three or more times. A building designed with major shortcomings initially—lack of weighthearing capacity on floor or frame, lack of height and width, shortage of room for further expansion—may plague its owners for the whole of its lifespan.
Planning
Forward planning with flexibility in mind is often hindered by legislation and restrictions and, on a global scale, there is a worldwide lack of integration of building codes, fire regulations, insurance requirements and storage parameters. Falconer and Drury stress that these factors add to building costs. They also note the slow progress of standardisation in unit-load handling equipment. If modular conformity for pallets, containers, etc, is unlikely to be achieved in this century for inter-modal operations "there will be increasing standardisation of the size and weight of unit loads, leading to higher
stacking, faster handling methods and calling in turn for greater headroom, better floors and higher quality buildings."
Industrial Storage and Distribution is designed to provide architects, as overall co-ordinators, with sufficient background
knowledge to understand the problems of specialists. Each section of the book which deals with warehouse types—mechanised, bulk, manual, etc—discusses the theory behind the operation of the storage process. The aim is to give architects enough data to "check a user's brief, to understand consultants' reports and what lies behind their decisions, and, if necessary, to question both brief and consultants' decisions, as well as how current and future conditions affect the distribution system as a whole."
Ambitious
This is an ambitious task. Readers are helped by technical study pages devoted to the storage process and the building function. It is encouraging to note the realistic appreciation ofthe authors of the transport function—external and internal. In the initial planning stages for a distribution depot the multi
disciplinary team—architect, surveyor, electrical engineer, accountant, insurer, etc—includes expert advisers on transport and mechanical handling; union shop stewards, drivers and warehousemen are brought into the planning process before and after the depot is commissioned.
Transport and distribution managers and depot designers are given comprehensive help on vehicle dimensions and swept turning circles of large articulated outfits, for typical European two-axle trucks drawing three axle trailers, for pantechnicons, fuel tankers, rigid tippers, even three-axle skip lorries. The explicit diagrams showing minimum road widths, fence lines, pavement dimensions—how much to allow on corners to permit two large artics to pass safely—all this is spelt out clearly. The cost of simulations for a variety of vehicles using a typical large distribution depot is more than the price of the book.
There is a valuable Appendix giving vehicle dimensions and loadings for Australia and the USA. I have not seen before in any British publication the weight tolerances allowed for designated vehicles in American States (Georgia, 18,000lb plus 13 per cent; North Carolina, 1,000lb tolerance on any one axle).
Incentives
This review may be ended by a few chance extracts. "In swopbody parks, as in containerhandling. areas, some form of personnel accommodation is likely to be required; this is liable to be in the form of an office, we and washing facilities. At major interchange points, with numbers of long-distance vehicles passing through, rest and vending facilities should be provided for the drivers. This is no luxury; it gives an incentive for drivers not to waste time in cafés on the road."
"With the proposed 4m height limit for lorries in EEC countries, 2.6m (8ft 6in) high containers will be difficult to transport. A further complication in Europe has been the introduction of 2.6m x 2.6m section containers, designed specifically for the West German rail system. Outwardly similar to ISO containers, they have caused confusion at groupage depots, as they will not fit on to standard skeletal trailers," "High stacks of empty containers can become unstable in buffet and eddy conditions, and the funnel effect of stacks can produce high-velocity downdraughts. Injury has resulted by personnel being pushed against containers, and the accuracy of the plant in placing can he impaired."
" With post pallets in Britain, shoe-type legs are traditionally used, which wastes space. In the USA, for example, 1,100 x 1,200mm stacking containers can accommodate 40 per cent more material by eliminating the stacking shoe. Typical costsavings in a large American operation are 20 per cent on inplant handling, 14 per cent transport, 13 per cent storage (using pallets nested with a conical peg and recessed cone)."
Sensible
Dual-purpose loading bays (ie one bay handling both incoming and dispatch goods) may be sensible if economies allow only one door per cold chamber. Because refrigerated vehicles seldom collect the same product from a contract store as delivered, cross-bay circulation for loading goods for dispatch is often necessary. Some operators remove unloaded vehicles back to the accumulation area until a bay near the cold room for the dispatched goods becomes free. " This not only reduces one-dock . .ice build-up, but allows time for refrigerated vehicles to be decontaminated (eg venting gas after carrying apples)."