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Indoor and Outdoor Warehouse for Building Materials and Timber
New Drive-Through Warehouse for the Biel Site
HG COMMERCIALE (HGC), one of the Swiss building industry’s leading trading companies, has expanded its sales outlet in Biel with rack systems from OHRA. A tailor-made combination of cantilever, pallet, and vertical racks provides more space for a broad product range of building materials. The roofed warehouse has been designed as a drive-through warehouse - customers drive through the warehouse in one direction, obtaining their goods directly from the various racks.
In addition to classic building materials, HGC also supplies professionals from the building and finishing trades with wood products, tools, garden articles, and floor and wall coverings. With the extension of the warehouse in Biel, HGC can offer its customers in the region an even broader and deeper range of products. In order to safely and efficiently store the vast number of different goods, HGC has equipped the new drive-through warehouse with a combination of different rack systems from OHRA. The company based in Kerpen, Germany, is specialised in rack solutions, in particular for the building materials, timber, and metal sectors. For HGC, with its 40 sales outlets, OHRA is its main supplier in the field of warehouse technology.
The warehouse in Biel is divided into two drive-through zones covering an area of around 3,000 square meters. In the warehouse OHRA assembled around 600 meters of cantilever racks to a height of 9 meters, composed of seven storage levels employing cantilever arms, generally with a depth of 2.5 meters, serviced by 4-way forklifts. In addition, vertical racks at the ends of the rows of racks facilitate the systematic storage of battens, profiles, and tubing. Hot-dip galvanised pallet and cantilever racks in the outside area provide space for a further 600 pallets. A 1,000 square meter platform has been integrated into the warehouse construction for the storage of insulation material.
The OHRA racks are no just tailored to HGC’s range of goods in terms of dimensions, load bearing capacity, and additional fittings, but are also finished in the company’s colours. Stands and frames have been painted black (RAL 9017), shelves and cantilever arms yellow (RAL 1018). Thus, the trading company’s corporate design has been uniformly extended to the warehouse where customers collect their goods.
About HG COMMERCIALE
HG COMMERCIALE is a Swiss trading cooperative. It operates 40 sales outlets for building materials and 20 showrooms for wall and floor coverings throughout Switzerland. The product range includes material for the building and finishing trades, as well as ceramic coverings as well natural stone and wood on a regional basis. With its 800 employees, HG COMMERCIALE generates a turnover of around 1 billion Swiss Francs.
