High Bay Light for Larger, Taller Warehouses

Glamox has today launched a powerful new LED high bay light designed to meet the needs of a new breed of mega-warehouses and industrial plants with high ceilings. The average height of a warehouse ceiling in the UK has risen from 12.2 m in 2015 to around 14 m today. Much of the explosion in the size and scale of warehousing is being driven by online retailing. In the UK, online retailers have increased their warehouse footprint from 743,224 m2 in 2015 to around 6.4 million m2 today1. A similar pattern is being repeated across Europe.

Taller ceilings require more powerful lights. Furthermore, today’s warehouses don’t just store goods. Many operate 24/7 and are places where goods are assembled, personalised, packaged, and despatched. This means that energy savings and the quality of light to support people’s safety, well-being, and productivity are business-critical issues.

The Glamox i65 comes in multiple configurations and can deliver 12,000 lumens up to a whopping 70,000 lumens with a choice of light distribution optics. Connected variants with a smart sensor can detect movement up to 20 m below so that the light switches on when people are about and dims down or switches off when they are not. Typically, this can reduce the amount of electricity used for lighting by 30-40%.

Mega-warehouses require lighting that redefines brilliance at elevated heights

“The i65 is a true beast of a light. It’s the Rolls-Royce of warehouse lighting at an exceptional price. A worthy successor to our beloved HI-MAX, which is now 10 years old,” said Martyn Wherry, Commercial Director of Glamox in the UK. “Our new luminaire establishes a new level of performance and quality – absolutely everything has been redesigned and improved.” According to Wherry, “A British Airways cargo hangar and a new tennis hall will be among the first to use the new i65.”

Environmentally friendly

Environmental considerations were high on the i65 design agenda. The LED modules are highly energy efficient, operating at up to 180 lm/w. Its body is made from 45% recycled aluminium, and the entire fixture is designed to support a circular economy. It offers a 100,000-hour life and has a high level of disassembly so that it can be easily upgraded to prolong its life, and parts can be easily replaced or recycled. The i65 is designed to operate in demanding industrial environments in temperatures ranging from -20°C to +50°C. Contrary to most similar products, it offers C4 anti-corrosion paint as standard (see Notes to Editors for full specifications). The new luminaire was designed and built by Glamox in the UK and is now being rolled out across Europe.

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Will Darkness Protect us from COVID-19?

Sunlight was supposed to be the answer to COVID-19. However, fully automated warehouses that no longer need lighting or heating are helping to keep supply lines open during the pandemic. Here Neil Ballinger, head of EMEA sales at automation equipment supplier EU Automation, explains why retailers and distributors are investing heavily in fully automated distribution centres.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated a divide between those companies that have embraced technology and those that have not. Retailers who had invested in automation and e-commerce fared better than their competitors. In 2020, the share price of Ocado, a British online supermarket, doubled while the share price of Marks and Spencer, a traditional high-street retailer, has halved. Clearly, in the eyes of investors the future of retail is online.

Behind the scenes of the race to online shopping, retailers and distributors are working hard to automate their warehouses and gear them towards new shopping behaviour. Amazon has emerged as one of the pioneers in logistics automation. The first generation of logistics professionals at Amazon had cut their teeth at Walmart. When they started working for Amazon, they quickly learned that shipping individual parcels directly to end customers required a different set of processes compared to shipping pallets of goods to stores.

Dark Warehouse

According to Brad Stone, the author of The Everything Store, Amazon executives realised that if they improved how orders were fulfilled, they could turn this into a competitive advantage. They invented a software to calculate the best way of combining the products in each individual order, factor in the address of the customer and ship it all in the least expensive way. Fast and cost-effective, picking, packing and shipping became a strategic advantage for Amazon.

The next frontier in warehouse automation is to seamlessly integrate the processes of sorting, picking and packing. Boxing-up parcels has traditionally been a very labour-intensive process. Last year, Amazon started to invest in packing machines built by CMC, an Italian automation specialist, which pack up to 700 boxes per hour. Automated packaging is currently booming. In Germany, Dm-Drogerie Markt, the country’s largest drugstore, has invested 100 million Euros into a new distribution centre. It contains state-of-the-art automation systems built by Swisslog, a Swiss logistics automation supplier. In the UK, The White Company, a clothing retailer, is planning to install a Quadient CVP Everest, also an automated packing machine, in August 2020.

Does a fully automated warehouse still need lighting? In a recent newsletter, Swisslog’s Paul Stringeman described the distribution centre of the future as follows: “no staff driving back and forth on forklift trucks, no load handlers examining products and picking items onto pallets, not even an electric light – just sky high racking, shuttles, lifts, robots, conveyors and autonomous vehicles choosing their own paths through the darkness”.

COVID-19 accelerated the use of technology in logistics. When a warehouse is fully automated, it no longer needs flickering neon tubes to keep running. Lights-out logistics is fast becoming a reality. http://www.euautomation.com/us/

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