Prime Cargo
The Conveyor System Is the Heart of Prime Cargo’s New 3PL Warehouse
Prime Cargo of Denmark is a total supplier of forwarding solutions but has for many years focused on 3PL solutions.
Prime Cargo has now established a more than 10,000 m2 big 3PL centre at Goleniow in Poland for storage, pick pack and distribution of goods for both the retail trade and end customers all over Europe. It has been a very exciting project”, says project manager Steffen Holm of Q-System. “We have been working closely together with both the French supplier of the shelving and with Consafe, who supplied the warehouse management system. We shipped and installed conveyors successively for more than 3 months; this gives an idea of the size of the conveyor system.”
The conveyor system,
comprising roller conveyors, upward and downward belt conveyors and a great number of chutes, is installed on both floor level and on a very big mezzanine, where the packaging of the boxes is taking place.
“The conveyor system is the link between the many manual handlings; from the picking to the packaging, between the various floor levels, where the handling is taking place, to the final sorting of the boxes for shipment by truck.
“By means of the conveyor system we have been able to reduce considerably the number of footsteps that Prime Cargo’s staff would otherwise have had to take to carry out the work. This means increased efficiency and capacity” says Steffen Holm.
The Background
“By having a 3PL distribution centre in Poland we can offer our customers the obvious advantage of having the many manual operations involved carried out at a lower price. There is a constant development within E-commerce, so we have to find the right balance between automation and manual handling”, explains Søren Miené, managing director of Prime Cargo Poland.
“As a 3PL provider we do not always know the products of tomorrow and we need, therefore, to be flexible and willing to adapt, a fact that can limit our possibilities of automation. There is a saying, however, “do not work harder – work smarter”. We bore this in mind when planning the new 3PL centre in Poland.
We had a clear concept that we put out to tender. After a few meetings with Q-System, it was clear to us that in many respects our two companies are built from the same DNA in terms of innovation, flexibility and cooperativeness.
Therefore, it was clear to us that Q-System should supply the conveyor system for the new centre.
At that time Q-System had recently handed over a similar conveyor system to Matas, a big chain store within Danish retail, doing in E-commerce as well. This was a certainly a benefit as we are following Matas’ development very closely facing the same challenges within E-commerce. So this was another indication that Q-System would be able to understand our problematics”, concludes Søren Miené.
