Raymond^® Orderpickers help Boelter Supply meet foodservice industry needs. Imagine going to your favorite restaurant for dinner only to find that the restaurant is out of napkins or attending a sporting event and being told that the venue is out of plastic cups. Boelter Supply in Glendale, Wisconsin, is a one-stop shop that offers almost everything foodservice and hospitality businesses need to get started and stay up and running. To store the vast offering of supplies, Boelter needs a large warehouse with enough rack space for storage. In October 2007, Boelter moved into a 100,000-square-foot building and installed 26 rows of 264- foot racking.

Maximizing Space, Uptime

When Boelter moved into its new building, the company wanted to maximize the available space. The ceiling in the new warehouse is 30 feet high — 7 feet higher than Boelter’s previous location — which enabled the company to install 25-foot-tall racks. With long aisles and tall racking, Boelter needed a new fleet of lift trucks that would reach the top of the racks and navigate the narrow aisles—The Raymond Corporation was their answer. Boelter worked with an authorized Sales and Service Center for Raymond, Stoffel Equipment Company, Inc., in Milwaukee, to help choose Raymond orderpickers for the new facility.

Because the new warehouse has narrow aisles, Boelter decided to install Raymond’s exclusive intelliguide^™ Digital Wire Guidance System to complement the orderpickers. With Raymond’s wire guidance system, operators can travel at higher speeds in the aisles and can focus on handling the load and picking orders instead of steering in the aisle. The aisles in Boelter’s facility also are equipped with end-of-aisle slowdown, which slows the lift trucks to 3 miles per hour at the beginning and end of the aisles.

Busy Almost Year-Round

Boelter’s regional distribution requires three shifts of employees working five days per week to stock products and pick orders for delivery. With eight Raymond orderpickers, it’s important that Boelter makes sure all its equipment is running smoothly.

We work very hard to meet our customers’ requirements and get them the products they need,” says Michael Quesnell, distribution manager for Boelter. “We’re busy almost year-round — schools stock up on supplies in the summer and restaurants have huge orders right before major holidays. We will special order products if we don’t have them in house. If a restaurant needs a new fryer right before a fish fry or needs to order new linens the day before Mother’s Day brunch, we’ll work hard to meet that restaurant’s needs. Without our Raymond orderpickers, we wouldn’t be able to meet the demands.

Raymond and Stoffel provided Boelter the equipment it needed to maximize space in its new warehouse and efficiently store and retrieve the thousands of products — from stemware to sponges — that Boelter customers need to run their businesses.

• Request More Information
• View Article in PDF Format