P Pullar & Co are a family business located in Cobram. The business was established almost 100 years ago. The property is 215 hectares in size, and consists of 100,000 trees including a variety of fruit – peaches, pears, apples, cherries and plums.
The company also stores fruit in their cool store facility for packing & exporting. It started as a relatively small storage facility with 8 rooms, but has grown to include 23 storage chambers and a capacity of up to 18,500 pallets.
Pullar cold storage was using a paper based system to manage stock in their warehouse. Due to the warehouse business growing, managing this amount of stock with a paper based system was proving inefficient. A large investment was made to expand the site, with three new cool rooms added in 2002/2003, and capacity increased by 8000 pallets.
Management were keen to employ new technologies which they have seen deployed at the local Murray Goulburn site, their client to whom they stored pallets for. Their focus was to provide better management and tracking of stock within P Pullar & Co’s warehouse and to be able to integrate their system directly into Murray Goulburn’s ERP system. They wanted to improve efficiencies between the two organisations, as well as provide Murray Goulburn with clear stock visibility, reducing the daily reporting that was being output.
A modified version of TRAX warehouse management system was implemented at P Pullar & Co’s site to manage Murray Goulburn pallets, as well as the fruit from their own orchard.
RTS worked with Murray Goulburn (their existing client) to propose a suitable solution for P Pullar & Co. They identified the need for a new IBM host computer system, point to point wireless LAN between the two sites (which are 7 kms apart), and 6 vehicle mounted RTS terminals with rugged scanners to manage stock in the warehouse.
As a result of the technology solution implemented, P Pullar & Co were able to manage the additional 8,000 pallets (twice the previous capacity), with the addition of only one more forklift bringing the fleet to a total of six.
P Pullar & Co have been able to greatly improve service levels to their existing clients. Their large, sophisticated operation, is now supported by leading technology, and is consistent with that provided by large cold store operations.
The system works very well. RTS provides an excellent level of service, quality products, and have enabled us to realize our goal of significantly improving our cold store warehouse operation.