Bishop's Move undertake relocation of world-famous car company Bentley Motors
22nd October 2008
When world-famous car company Bentley motors recently relocated their entire World Wide Distribution warehouse from the original Bentley manufacturing site at Crewe to a new 150,000ft² facility some four miles away, they turned to Bishop’s Move, the UK’s largest privately- owned removal company, to plan and undertake the massive move.
It was clear from the outset that this was no ordinary move and would require extensive and complex planning in order to achieve the physical move within the time frame available. Bishop’s Move allocated a Senior Project Manager based on site to work with Bentley Motors for a period of six months prior to the move. Part of the pre planning work involved obtaining a detailed understanding of how the existing systems functioned and the re-design of the high density narrow aisle order picking system to achieve the required picking speeds for the physical move.
It was also necessary to condense the existing range of tote bins to four standard sizes which was no small task considering the total number of parts stored in the tote bins numbered in excess of 30,000 and there could be no interruption to the daily picking routine.
Redditch-based Bishop’s Move Birmingham provided a dedicated team for three months to complete the tote exercise and in addition the team also pre-labelled over 5,000 tote bins and 5,000 palletised parts in readiness for the move.
The whole transfer of goods had to be completed in a ten-day period with the distribution warehouse non-operational for only three of those days. This raised further complications in terms of health and safety for both Bentley and Bishop’s Move staff and also required detailed logistical plans to be developed and agreed prior to the move.
To complete the move on time, Bishop’s Move called on the services from 5 of its 24 nationwide regional depots – Birmingham, Southampton, Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The teams worked shift patterns providing a 24-hour on site operation. The move was completed early much to the satisfaction of the client.
The months of dedicated planning along with the tireless work of the Bishop’s Move teams ensured the project was delivered ahead of schedule which was a remarkable achievement and a real credit to all of the team members involved.
