Critical Issues

The fuel duty hike yet again shows the Government's contempt for the haulage industry, says Kevin Buchanan, Managing Director of Palletline.

A major manufacturer is looking to outsource the provision and management of a UK Northern Distribution Centre to a Third Party Logistics provider through a competitive tender process.

A survey on future transport cost trends revealed that two thirds of respondents believe that increasing fuel prices will be the main cause of rising logistics costs.

BITA (the British Industrial Truck Association) has announced that sales orders for forklift trucks increased by 20% in 2011, continuing the recovery from the market low point two years ago.

Perhaps no other segment of the UK labour force is more reliant on mobile technology than couriers and drivers of the 3.24 million delivery vans.

45% of senior managers in UK forklift truck companies started their careers as an engineering apprentice, according to a survey of British Industrial Truck Association (BITA) members.

Howard Tenens was delighted to host a recent visit by the local MP for Barking & Dagenham, the Right Honourable Margaret Hodge MP to the Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) Ltd. sustainable warehouse at Voltaic in Dagenham, which will service the Olympic Park during 2012.

Reinforcing its commitment to sustainability, materials handling manufacturer George Utz Ltd is now generating its own energy to help run operations at Alfreton in Derbyshire, with the installation of solar energy panels.

Solutions provider Dematic is pledging its support for the Fraunhofer IML "Cloud Computing for Logistics" innovation cluster.

Are operational accuracy, flexibility, and productivity important to you? They are for international medical device vendor, DJO, Inc. who needed a better way to pick, pack and ship customer orders. Then, their order processing throughput improved by 40% the day they started using Kiva.View the case study DJO Kaizen and Kiva.

Many live storage systems are installed without achieving the pick rates envisaged due to simple design issues that could easily be picked out if a customer had access to a test facility before installation. Ed Hutchison, managing director at Bito Storage Systems believes a test facility is essential in achieving optimum performance from a system and assuring the customer of the system's quality.