Express Trailers has acquired a new 2,800sqm warehouse in Qormi to centralise all its managed warehousing activity from one depot and to be able to cater for the increased business in this sector.
Express Trailers entered the managed warehousing sector in 2011 when the company invested in its first two warehouses for the storage and distribution of pharmaceutical products in a total 900sqm of temperature-controlled environment. These facilities, with a capacity of over 1,550 pallets, are licensed by the medical authorities and complement Express Trailers’ international pharma transport services, which are up to EU pharma good distribution practices (GDP) standards in the industry.
Express Trailers chairman and CEO Franco Azzopardi said: “The company always had vision. In 1995, it was already the first local service company to attain ISO certification. Today, we are reaping the fruits of those business decisions.”
Companies should concentrate on investing in their people and their core operations and leave the handling of imports, exports, deliveries and distribution to a company like us
Explaining how this business activity developed, Azzopardi said: “The first two pharma warehouses meant Express Trailers had to also invest in a warehouse management system (WMS), an IT-based platform that can be modified to cater for different types of commodities besides pharmaceuticals. Since different commodities require different handling, this system allows us to include permutations that can cater for other goods, such as brown goods, white goods, manufacturing goods and more. We therefore invested in another two warehouses and structured them accordingly to store such items. This led to two major companies - a telcom and a white goods company - to contract us to start handling their warehousing and distribution.
“The prospects of more growth in this activity led us to start consolidating our available space and we decided to centralise our managed warehousing service under one roof to be able to offer a better and more efficient service to an increased demand. Our pharma warehouses will remain next to our main offices but our current managed warehouses located opposite will be moved to this new 2,800sqm warehouse in Qormi, leaving us with more space that will be utilised better to gain more efficiencies,” added Azzopardi.
Commenting on what led to this move, Azzopardi spoke about how space is increasingly becoming a very valuable asset, and companies should look into more ways how to utilise it more productively.
“Companies should not be investing in storage space, transport and logistics but should concentrate on investing in their people and their core operations and leave the handling of imports, exports, deliveries and distribution to a company like us that is specialised and already equipped with the space and the means to handle this increasingly complex activity.
“What we are offering is a scalable storage and distribution solution, a ‘pay-as-you-use’ system where merchants, instead of owning and managing their ancillary warehouses and being tied down with idle space and human resources, can avail themselves of the space they need thus cutting significant costs, especially when their stored stocks are at their lowest.
“This latest investment in our new 2,800sqm warehouse in Qormi’s industrial estate is our company’s next important move. We are confident that this will be a concrete step that will cement Express Trailers as the leader in the local managed warehousing sector,” Azzopardi said.