Draper Tools have been a highly successful wholesaler of hand and power tools for over a century. The family-owned company supplies a loyal client base of over 4,000 tool retailers throughout the UK and overseas. Their products range from simple gardening and DIY tools through to high-end products designed for specialist trade and professional users.
Why Radioshuttle™?
"Our most recent application of the technology has allowed us to increase the speed of our pallet put-away and retrieval processes while, the exceptional density of the storage space, means we are now making the most profitable use of our entire building", says Matthew Boschi.
Draper Tools has long recognized the benefits of the Radioshuttle™ system, implementing the technology in 2006, 2008, 2014, and 2018 before its most recent investment.
During the Covid-19 crisis Draper Tools launched a dropshipping service to support its retail trade customers as they pivoted to ecommerce to help sustain tool sales during the lockdown periods.
The new service gave retailers the opportunity to significantly shorten their ecommerce supply chains by outsourcing responsibility for fulfilment of orders for Draper Tools products generated via their online channel directly to Draper.
It proved extremely popular from day one and demand has continued to grow to the point where today it represents a significant part of Draper’s business. In fact, some 40% of the orders picked at Draper Tools’ Hampshire-based national distribution centre (DC) are now destined for the homes of consumers who shop for tools online.
Adapting to the new normal
The rapid growth and sustained success of the dropshipping scheme created a challenge for Draper, as Matt Boschi, Draper Tools’ Operations Director, explains:
“Our intralogistics model has always been based on meeting the stock replenishment needs of retailers and distributors. These businesses typically order around 40 – 45 different line items every time they place an order and our storage, picking and packing processes were geared to meeting this type of demand.
“Online consumers tend to buy single units, so we had to rethink our storage, picking and packing strategy to meet the very different requirements of an online fulfilment business in order to provide the high levels of service and rapid delivery times that our retail partners and their customers demand.”
Matt continues: ‘As more and more retailers started outsourcing their online fulfilment operation to us it became increasingly clear that not only did we need to hold more inventory, we also had to develop a way of effectively combining online order picking with the need to collate much larger replenishment stock orders. More ground level picking locations were required – although we couldn’t give up any of our existing full pallet storage capacity!”
Unlocking Space
Effective space utilisation was clearly the key to successfully accommodating Draper’s new Business-to-Consumer (B2C) fulfilment operation alongside the company’s core Business-to-Business (B2B) warehousing activity within the 560,000 sq ft DC.
Draper approached their long-term supplier, Toyota Material Handling to identify a way of achieving a solution that met the operational requirements of both the B2B and B2C channels in a safe, sustainable and throughput efficient way and avoided having to extend the distribution centre building itself or make other costly structural changes to the unit.
Following a thorough evaluation of Draper Tools’ needs, Toyota was able to optimise the available storage area by reconfiguring certain aspects of the facility and replacing the existing racking scheme with a high-density storage system served by Radioshuttle™ pallet put-away and retrieval technology. This would deliver Draper’s objectives in a highly cost-effective way that also minimised disruption to the day-to-day activity at the busy DC during the installation period.
Radioshuttle™ as a solution
Radioshuttle™ is a deep storage solution that has been designed to make the most use of a storage building’s floor area and height dimensions. Highly flexible and infinitely scalable, it is an ideal system for holding the significant amount of inventory that Draper needs to feed both its B2B and B2C picking stations.
“We didn’t hesitate when Toyota suggested a solution that had Radioshuttle at its heart,” says Matthew Boschi.
Draper Tools was already very familiar with the range of advantages that the Radioshuttle™ offers, having specified the technology on no less than four separate occasions (in 2006, 2008, 2014 and 2018) prior to the most recent investment. Matt Boschi says: “We first deployed the Radioshuttle™ pallet storage system in 2006 and the technology has been highly beneficial to our business ever since.”
A total of 14 RadioShuttles now operate within Draper Tools’ storage scheme. The reworked high density storage scheme provides Draper with 35,000 SKUs and 40,000 pallet locations.
Using the Radioshuttle™ solution has brought a range of efficiencies to our business for many years. Our most recent application of the technology has allowed us to increase the speed of our pallet put-away and retrieval processes while, the exceptional density of the storage space, means we are now making the most profitable use of our entire building. I would not hesitate to encourage any company that’s looking for a way to maximise its stockholding capacity to consider what a Radioshuttle™ storage solution could do for them.
