Wincanton and B&Q praise ErgoPack pallet strapping solution

We’re delighted that teams from two of Britain’s leading companies, Wincanton plc and B&Q, have praised our ErgoPack pallet strapping machines.

The B&Q Distribution Centre in Swindon is operated under contract by Wincanton plc, the logistics and supply chain experts, handling the storage, inward and outward shipping of thousands of home and garden products at the 860k sq. ft site.

As part of this operation, Dave Bull, Continuous Improvement Manager for Wincanton B&Q, explains how both companies have a social obligation to sustainability and how he had an objective to remove plastic from their network, and to improve operational performance.

Watch the video on our YouTube channel to see how Dave and his colleagues found the solution to these issues.

The warehouse process identified an opportunity to reduce or remove the plastic pallet wrap that was used to wrap products onto pallets for storage when they arrived at Goods In. These products were then stored until the pallets were unwrapped and the products picked to be sent to B&Q stores around the UK. For Dave, this drove waste, cost and multiple touchpoints into the business.

Working in partnership with Dave, Simon Watt (Technical Sales Manager at Wessex Packaging), looked at solutions to reduce or remove this excess plastic pallet wrap from the process. With Simon’s palletisation packaging expertise, they implemented a trial of an ErgoPack mobile pallet strapping machine to evaluate how strapping products to a pallet, compared to wrapping them with pallet film.

This trial not only proved successful from a plastic reduction perspective, but also significantly improved the palletisation and picking process in the distribution centre.

Dave and the Wincanton B&Q team then went onto introduce two ErgoPack machines into the Swindon distribution centre.

In the first year of using ErgoPack to strap pallets (rather than wrap in plastic), the Wincanton B&Q team removed 30 tonnes of plastic waste from their Swindon distribution centre, and another 40 tonnes from their other sites.

Introducing ErgoPack as part of the Wincanton B&Q logistics process has delivered a return on investment in just 16 weeks, which as Dave says “…is a very, very good win.”

In addition to the savings made in productivity and efficiency by using the ErgoPack mobile pallet strapping machines, the warehouse team have seen an improvement in their musculoskeletal positioning.

Instead of awkwardly wrapping pallets by hand and having to bend and stretch, the ergonomic ErgoPack machine enables the operator to stand in one position and easily and efficiently strap a pallet in under 30 seconds.

Dave Bull says: “I’d certainly recommend Wessex and the ErgoPack strapping system to anybody. The quality of service has been brilliant, the comms has been precise…always on point, and the pricing strategy is really competitive. They will always do the right thing.”

If you’d like to see how ErgoPack can help your logistics process, contact us for a no-obligation on-site demo and Simon Watt or Kevin Saltmarsh will bring a machine to your warehouse.

Contact us on 01935 474 217 or email [email protected]

Wessex Packaging is the Official GB ErgoPack Distributor. Visit the ErgoPack.com website.

Watch the independently verified video of Dave Bull talking about the ErgoPack project. The video was filmed and produced by Jon Coulter of Truthful Testimonials. We would like to thank Dave Bull, and the team at Wincanton B&Q, for giving this testimonial.