Europa Warehouse in Corby s-b2c470e6

3PL in Corby The Place 2 Be

The 300 strong team at a market-leading 3pl logistics facility in Corby has just celebrated its second birthday, during which a brand-new ambition for the facility was also unveiled by its leaders.

As well as marking the two-year anniversary of the opening of its £60m 750,000 sq. ft 3pl warehouse at Midlands Logistics Park, specialist logistics provider, Europa Warehouse made it clear it wants Corby to be recognised as the employer of choice within the region.

It aims to achieve this by creating a workplace where employees have a great experience, receive competitive pay rates, and are able to develop careers and skills through training and development programmes.

Europa Warehouse Division Director Dionne Redpath, who is also Group Chief Operating Officer for Europa Worldwide Group, explained: “The second anniversary of the official opening of our Corby facility was a fantastic opportunity to bring our teams together to celebrate over cake and a catch up.

“In chatting to colleagues, we also took this opportunity to share our own ambition with them. As well as offering a safe, good humoured and fulfilling place to work, we want Europa Corby to be a place where everyone comes together and enjoys seeing their collective effort come to fruition through fantastic levels of customer service.

“During the two years since Corby has been operational, we've made significant progress - having delivered efficiencies and improved our offering to customers. We're also deeply focused on boosting the culture in our workplace.

“Our goal is for our growing team to feel highly valued, so they become a part of something bigger, bolder, and better as they embark on their journey with us.

“We want everyone to feel proud of Europa Corby and to tell their friends and families about our determination to grow the Warehouse division and the overall Group even more in the coming months and years.”

Europa Worldwide Group recently announced the target to break through £300m in turnover had been achieved over the last 12 months. Corby’s contribution to that overall performance has been crucial, with the facility having gone from strength to strength since it was constructed and commissioned at the height of the global pandemic.

The warehouse operates five key contracts for clients, growing from just two at the outset, and provides e-commerce fulfilment activities for four blue-chip alcohol retailers and one healthcare provider.

The site’s operations are geared up to serving practically any product type – from cosmetics and perfumes to components, electricals and general consumer goods. The scale of the operations also continues to grow, reflecting the increased unit sales experienced by Europa’s clients over the past two years and resulting in a five-fold increase in the workforce.

Operational capacity at Corby has been built up in line with this success, with activity being planned and scaled up according to client need to meet the growing demands from their own customer base. Originally, four teams worked on the initial two contracts across three production lines; now, there are eleven teams in total operating across 6 production lines and two e-commerce shop operations, with support from specific pick and pack teams.

The site is supported by an in-house engineering team at the site, who oversee the impressive £11m automation system, ensuring Europa Warehouse’s largest and most high-tech facility in the UK continually delivers an agile approach with optimal output. Volumes of goods passing through the warehouse have increased by 350% since June 2020, from 8,000 units per day to 28,000 per day.

Arron Delamare, Head of Operations at Europa Warehouse in Corby, explained: “Within the current operating windows, our intelligent systems at Corby are instrumental in enabling us to plan workflows and deliver activities in line with lean principles that ensure maximum output for our clients.

“Whilst our cutting-edge automation processes are essential in improving productivity and helping us to drive down operational costs for our customers, so too are our fantastic teams of staff who always work immensely hard during each shift to exceed their ongoing targets.

“Without them, Corby wouldn’t have seen such success, so it was absolutely brilliant to all come together and celebrate our two-year anniversary and share the vision for the Warehouse going forwards.

“Europa Warehouse will continue to invest in both our team and facility to maintain our current levels of growth. We’re very excited about nurturing our long-term partnerships and adding further clients to our portfolio by offering solutions that set the pace in the market.”

Staff from across the Corby site – who all fulfil a range of roles from operatives to forklift drivers, flow managers to engineers – were delighted to have the opportunity to mark the facility’s second birthday, especially Facilities Co-ordinator Paul Coe, who also joined the warehouse on the day it officially opened for business. He said: “I couldn’t ask for a better role, supporting cast and management.”

Europa’s Corby warehouse was constructed to the very latest specification, with above market standard 18 metre heights to facilitate three floors of mezzanines. To maximise the height of the building, racking has been built to nine levels (most other warehouses have only seven) and utilises the very latest very narrow aisle and integrated systems technology.

Europa Warehouse provides a range of value-added capabilities including e-commerce fulfilment, production services, inventory management, packing, labelling, special deliveries, final assembly, quality control and critical parts management. Corby operates alongside two other award-winning sites in Dartford and Birmingham, offering a combined 1,072,000 sq. ft of dedicated warehouse and logistics space.