That Was the Weekend that Was

Author: Sheila Bounford

Keith Rogers picks the first book

Reading the first post on this blog, my colleague Sian in customer services was heard to comment "I thought this was supposed to be the short answer". So before we get onto the more complex tier of reasons for our move, here are some notes and pictures from the weekend.

This morning at about 9.30am the first book was picked from the new pick face in the 10 Thornbury Road warehouse. Entirely co-incidentally (but rather fittingly) the task was performed by Keith Rogers, who attended the opening ceremony of the original Plymouth distribution centre of MacDonald & Evans Publishing in June 1976.  That company is the great-grandparent of the company that is today NBNi, and Keith's wife, Sue was one of the company's first employees. Sue is still one of our Customer Services Supervisors.

We cleaned and we cleaned some more

Today's first pick is the culmination of an incredibly busy weekend with one team lead by Neil Talliss and Darren Glasper focusing on packing up the last orders in Estover Road, Duncan "Max" Maxwell and colleagues transporting stock over to Thornbury Road, and a third team, led by Karen Marley filling pick bins. Even Chip our CFO & MD spent much of the weekend manhandling boxes and queueing up stock ready to populate the pick face. And another team cleaned. Unpacking and shelving books creates a huge amount of waste shrinkwrap and cardboard: breaking this down and clearing it into skips was on its own a full time job. But you only get one chance to start in a clean warehouse - and we were determined to take it. Juliette was spotted on her hands and knees vacuuming under the new packing line at one point!

Stock location being scanned on putaway

Jane Cutler, our HR Manager, was also in all weekend, and when she wasn't busy being part of the cleaning crew she was ensuring everyone was fed and watered. She also set up the new staff rest area, which comes complete with some sofas, as well as fridges, kettles and microwaves. We're planning to install a small lending library in there too over the next few weeks.

The I.T. team were on hand testing that all of the daily routines work. Of course it is always the unexpected that catches you out, and at we were temporarily mystified as to why the scanning guns weren't working. It turned out the guns were confused about whether they were looking for the Estover Road network IP address, or the Thornbury Road IP address. The reason why this was an issue still isn't completely clear - but once Dave Eagle had worked his magic on them it was quickly resolved, and stock was put away into its new locations and the system updated in real time via the scanners.

As I type, the first packing is beginning to happen on the packing line. We are going "slow and steady" about what we release for pick at present, while we continue to ensure everything is running properly. The end of day sales figures should be fairly high because of the sheer volume we pushed through over the weekend, and the pace of normal pick, pack activities will accelerate rapidly over the next hours and days.  We're also finishing off an enormous multiple-pallet Amazon consignment in that was begun Estover Road and is now having the final stock picked and added in Thornbury Road.  Small orders and urgent small / web site orders are flowing out to customers too.

Perhaps this gives a sense of scale

Without having seen it for themselves, I think it is hard for many of our publisher clients to grasp the full scale of what we have built here. (We're really looking forward to inviting everyone down to take a look and for a bit of a party - so stand by for notification of the date for that.) I've been involved in the planning of this for over a year - and even though I am so closely acquainted with what we have been aiming at, I still get a "wow" moment when I see stock being taken down from the 8th tier of the hi-bay. And when I stand back from the pick face and see it being filled with stock all neatly laid out ready for picking - I have to confess - there's a tear in my eye!

So, there still remains a great deal of work to be done. We now have our main operation sited in the Thornbury Road warehouse, but there is still a lot of stock to be brought over, and this process will carry on for a few more weeks. We've moved a lot of the easy stuff. There are still many mixed pallets to come so the hard work is by no means finished. But today marks step change in our business and our service to our publishers and customers.

Thornbury Rd Parcel No 1 packed by Jarek Plamowski

I've named a few of our unsung heroes above. But there are lots more - like Jenny from order processing who spent the weekend doing warehouse work and is very glad to be back at her desk today. We have many members of staff who have worked a great deal of overtime in recent weeks - and in warehouses with concrete floors that is physically very demanding. They all deserve a "shout out". Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone at NBNi who has put in so much work to getting us to today - and who will be keeping it up while we complete the job over the next few weeks.