With the advent of people being asked to work from home due to the Coronavirus outbreak, suppliers of office furniture saw an exponential increase in the need for work chairs, desks, printer stands and cupboards, in a very short space of time. Where working from home wasn’t an option, an unprecedented requirement for Covid-19 protection products was created, with the need to keep the workforce safe during their working day: virus screens, hazard tapes and anti-bacterial dispensers were needed to shield and protect staff and visitors alike. UK businesses in a position to meet these demands saw their workloads rapidly grow.
One such office furniture company, a client of ours based in Keighley, West Yorkshire, found themselves struggling to keep up with the increase of business. Having to comply with social distancing guidelines meant that only the minimum members of staff could be used to unload and reload their delivery vehicles. Containers of products and components arriving needed to be quickly and safely unloaded, checked, assembled, re-packaged and then re-loaded to keep up with the incredible increase in demand. Large shipping containers are not suitable for being unloaded or loaded by fork-lift trucks when goods are un-palletised. The regular method of hand balling goods had to be speeded up but still limited to a minimum of operatives.
Action Handling were asked to advise and supply equipment that could help with the task and after assessing the requirement, we recommended a past favourite that we have supplied many times over our 50 years in business. A high-rise telescopic conveyor suited the requirement perfectly and we duly supplied the item within 5 days from point of contact.
Telescopic conveyors can be supplied in lengths that can extend from 4 - 20 metres and are usually made in either 400, 600 or 900mm widths. This application demanded heavy duty steel rollers 50mm in diameter, rated for 100kg capacity per metre length. An open length with 4 sliding tiers of 16m was supplied and this meant that when fully retracted the conveyor closed to only 5.2m long. The tracks were designed so that they could be fully adjusted in height to suit the rise and fall of the trailer bed and with no loading bay on site this allowed for goods to flow from inside the building into the full length of the shipping containers. The tiers neatly slide one on top of another from the retracted to the extended length and the whole unit is mounted on heavy duty polyurethane braked swivel castors to ensure that the product is easily moved around from various positions.
Lighter loads often mean that PVC rollers can be supplied instead of steel. This makes the product lighter to handle and can be cleaned more easily if goods are likely to soil the rollers over a period of time. The conveyors can be bespoke made to suit any type of process or application and by adding additional roller sections the system can easily be extended to serve assembly or packaging lines that lead off from the loading point.
We’re happy to say that the client was able to keep up with their workload increase and the demand on office furniture was met!
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