...and there's Tesco.
By a series of events too tedious to go into here I ended up in Tesco's collosal distribution centre at Barlborough last Sunday afternoon.
This is certainly the biggest "manual pick" operation I have ever seen. Yes, I have been in bigger warehouses, but the are all lights-out places staffed entirely by robots.
Sunday was a quiet day for them, with minimum staff on site. According to the tally boards they had picked, caged and loaded a mere 16,000 cases that morning. Barely worth getting out of bed for.
They didn't seem happy about me taking pics of the really interesting stuff; the Robocop-style gauntlets with built in computer terminal and bar code reader on the fingers.
The ingenious gadget thet can look at a product box, tell you it's dimensions, it's weight, how to many to put on a pallet, how to stack them and what the loaded pallet will weigh.
The crafty bit of engineering that can change a broken pallet without having to unload the goods on board would probably have interested a few people here too.
Did sneak a few pics, just to give some idea of the scale of the place.
Tesco warehouse by
one_rod, on Flickr
Tesco warehouse by
one_rod, on Flickr
Tesco warehouse by
one_rod, on Flickr
Tesco warehouse by
one_rod, on Flickr
Tesco warehouse by
one_rod, on Flickr
one_rod.