There's big, there's very big...

[one_rod]

...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.

[spuddevans]

It's not that big, our downstairs lav's bigger than that


Tim

[bry1975]

That's actually QUITE big BUT compared to Foxcomm Shenzhen China factory quite small their Shenzhen factory alone covers 1.16square miles AND supposedly employ 500,000 workers at the Shenzhen facilities.

I think the western world will learn a lot from China.

1.9miles long for a factory is quite large and 0.8miles wide!

One thing at least Tesco's hasn't had the countless suicides that Foxconn have had due to their strict military style work ethic.  Foxconn make goods for HP, Nokia, Apple, Amazon etc.

[Stilldrillin]

Thanks Rod! 

I've often wondered, while passing, what the inside looks like...... 

The outside is pretty impressive too! 

David D

[Dean W]

Looks like a moderate sized Home Depot.  ; )

[andyf]

Interesting that the Foxcomm map mentions conversion from Taiwanese dollars rather than renminbi yuan at the bottom. Maybe it's a Taiwanese enterprise. If so, running a business in mainland China and taking profits of nearly US$2billion a year offshore shows a surprising degree of faith in the future.

Andy