Forget Roll Cages - Here Comes The Loadhog Pally And Lid

Transit packaging for the postal industry has been traditionally carried out using roll cages, but Ed Fanshawe, sales manager for Loadhog Limited, says that Loadhog's 'Pally & Lid' system will eliminate 30%-42% of ALL vehicles needed to move trayed mail when loaded and over 50% when moving empty equipment - optimising the handling and movement of mail trays whether full or empty.

Loadhog is an award winning company based in Sheffield, established five years ago to make innovative, patented transit packaging products for a number of different industries.

"Basically we solve every day problems like waste, security and reducing transport costs and as one of the founding managers at Loadhog, I confess to never having managed to impress many ladies by admitting to working in 'transit packaging', but I aim to change people's view of transit packaging and show that it is just as important as other areas involved in the movement of mail, including greener vehicles, and will make a huge difference to efficiency.

Pally and Lid for Secure Tranportation System Solutions

"The 'Pally & Lid' is already being adopted by UK Mail, TNT Post, Finland/Norway Post and several others including projects with Italian Post, Saudi Post, South Africa Post and Denmark Post

"There has been a massive focus on investment in the Postal Sector recently on network wide automation, innovative technology and greener, more efficient vehicles - HOWEVER, no body has bothered to do much about the way the mail trays are actually handled up to and after the automation, vehicles and physical locations - it's so frustrating as something like the Pally & Lid system can drive significant benefits in it's own right, with or without any of the investment in these other areas, yet it is frequently left right to the last minute once everything else has been commissioned and there is little choice left but to stick with existing equipment and design the entire system around that - embedding inefficiency!" said Ed.

The benefits of switching to the Pally & Lid system are numerous but a half euro (800x600mm) plastic pallet usable with all MHE, racking and high speed automation lines gives the exact same usable footprint as a roll cage, without all the metal. Once the trays are stacked on top, the Lid can be secured. One pedal Press will release the pallet bearers and the load becomes a fully mobile wheeled unit. One more pedal press will transfer up to 500kg of load from the wheels to the pallet bearers for total stability in picking, in transit and on tail lifts.

As Ed points out, it does require a different way of working but astonishingly, you can get 42% more Pally’s per 40ft trailer than you can with standard roll cages – 64 Pallys vs only 45 roll cages - that’s up to 42% of all transit vehicles taken off the road immediately. For empty mail trays, this vehicle utilisation increases to over 50% more than cages with 1/3 less weight per vehicle and in Mail Centre or Client operations, 10 empty Pally & Lids can be moved by one person (halving the trips currently needed to collect cages for end of line stacking or vehicle unloading). Significantly, 80% less space is needed to store empty Pally & Lids.

"Yorkshire men are reknowned for being especially 'careful' with their money – saving every penny wherever possible but I think most companies will be impressed with the savings proven by our client’s and I hope that says quite a lot" said Ed.