- Customer: Any Sea Food processing unit having Temperature Controlled Warehouse as part of their operations to store products like fish, prawns, shrimps, etc., in cold storage.
- We found that in the seafood processing industry, Temperature Controlled Warehouses with fewer SKUs are typically designed with either Double Deep, Shuttle Racking, or Drive-In types of Racking systems to optimize the cost of cooling and maintaining the required operating temperature. The Pantograph Reach Trucks are popular WHE which are deployed in such cold storages. However, the issue with these Reach Trucks is that they cannot function smoothly in narrow aisles. Further, their wheels are smaller in size with a much lesser ground clearance which may result in operational problems.
- To counter this problem, we suggest Nilkamal & Combilift – both single-deep & double-deep Aisle-Master Trucks with and w/o heated cabins. These trucks can very well operate in narrow aisles and in cold rooms with -22 degrees centigrade intermittently. The trucks with fully enclosed heated cabins can function for up to 4 hours in the cold rooms with -40 degree centigrade operating temperature. Other than this, we offer these trucks fitted with Quad Mast with lower closed mast height to keep the door height to the minimum possible.
Following are some of the ways we at Nilkamal can help customers:
- Develop green-field cold stores with single-deep or double-deep pallet racking with the appropriate truck that optimises pallet storage resulting in lower per pallet investment & operating costs for the customer.
- Relay existing racks in a customer’s cold store warehouse so aisle widths can be decreased to increase storage capacity in an existing cold store.
- Lower their typical fixed costs per pallet, including land, construction materials, construction cost, and refrigeration equipment.
- Lower their typical operating costs per pallet, including fixed overheads to run the warehouse, electricity for refrigeration & labour due to increased productivity.
Additional features & benefits specifically for cold store applications:
- The Heated Cabin allows the driver to comfortably operate the truck in the cold environment (up to -40 deg C) for four continuous hours without breaks. This increases labour productivity & equipment uptime.
- Allocated area for Bar Code scanning: The glass of the cabin at -40 deg C gets covered with ice which obstructs the laser from reading the bar code. The heated window provided in the Aisle-Master truck prevents condensation, thus allowing the scanner to read the barcode.
- Battery capacity: (i)The discharge rate of a battery is high at cold temperatures. The Nilkamal team carefully studied this application and teamed up with Combilift to offer a 930 Ah high-capacity battery. The higher thermal mass of this larger battery facilitates 4 hours of continuous operation. (ii) To further extend the battery life, we offer low-power consuming LED lights for visibility & safety. Both these options increase the time between battery changes & and re-charges, extend the life of the battery & improve equipment & worker productivity.
- . The battery is quickly & easily changed at the rear of the Aisle-Master with a hand-pallet truck. This increases equipment uptime & productivity.
So far, we have supplied the AM Trucks for 4-5 projects coming up in Telangana state for a Double deep racking system. The trucks are without the heated cabin but are modified to work in operating temp. of -22 deg. cent. For an intermittent period. Our first customer is so satisfied with our product that they even tried to relay the racking layout in their existing TCW with Pantograph RT so as to replace the same with AM Truck.
We have recently concluded an order for a supply of AM Trucks with Heated Cabin & 8100 mm Quad Mast to be used in the Shuttle Racking system for an upcoming cold storage project in Gujarat.