Mecalux has equipped three new warehouses for Grupo Morsa in Mexico

Socially responsible company

Grupo Morsa is a spare parts distribution company for the automotive industry that was created in 1978 in the Mexican city of Culiacan (in the state of Sinaloa, in the north of the country). It is especially proud to hold the ESR (Socially Responsible Companies) stamp of quality, one of the strongest and most established initiatives in Mexico in the realm of corporate social responsibility. This recognition is granted to companies that have adopted practices based on sustainability.

The company has 17 distribution centres spread throughout Mexico that attend to the needs of customers in this country. According to Israel Jacinto Gertrudiz, Grupo Morsa Operations Manager, “we are currently undergoing an ambitious growth process. Our expectations include opening new branches and being the customer’s first choice when they need spare parts for cars.” He is convinced that “customers choose us because of the quality of our service and the trust we create”.

Three warehouses for Grupo Morsa

Recently, the company has set up three distribution centres: it has opened one in the town of Oaxaca, and has expanded the warehouses located in Los Mochis and Tepic. In the words of the operations manager, “we wanted to make better use of the available space to achieve greater storage capacity”.

The company was seeking to equip them with storage systems that would facilitate operators' work and contribute to speeding up storage and order preparation tasks. “We wanted the racks to have a sturdy structure and the aisles to be wide so we could work comfortably,” explains Israel Jacinto Gertrudiz.

Grupo Morsa has used Mecalux on previous occasions when it needed to equip one of its warehouses. Indeed, its distribution centres in the towns of Querétaro, Villahermosa, Durango, Hermosillo and Zapopan use Mecalux racking. With the good results obtained in these facilities, the company did not hesitate to seek Mecalux's advice again for these three projects.

“We contacted Mecalux because we are pleased with the throughput in the other warehouses that they have equipped for us. Plus, we have had no problems in any of them with rack installation, and they have always met their deadlines,” notes Gertrudiz.

Israel Jacinto Gertrudiz - Operations Manager of Grupo Morsa
“We are delighted with the three warehouses in Oaxaca, Los Mochis and Tepic. The Mecalux racks have been adapted to the great multitude of products that we manage, and they help us to provide the service that our customers expect from us”.

Racking with walkways in the three warehouses

Mecalux has equipped the three warehouses with storage for picking. Above them there are raised aisles that make up a total of three floors. The benefit of this solution is that by taking full advantage of the building’s height, the useful storage space has been tripled, thus offering room for a greater number of products.

“The racks help us to carry out our operations with agility, especially in order preparation,” says the operations manager. Every day, each of the warehouses receives the pallets that its suppliers send from different parts of Mexico. All of them include a large variety of SKUs that the operators must classify and distribute in the warehouse logically and orderly.

Organisation is essential for managing warehouses with so many different SKUs: 46,000 in these three facilities (28,000 in Oaxaca and 18,000 in Los Mochis and Tepic) and 80,000 throughout Mexico. For this reason, the warehouses have been divided into sectors, and products with similar characteristics and demand are deposited on each floor. Thus, preparers know which area to go to when they need to locate a specific item.

Storage for picking facilitates the handling of goods because it offers direct access to them. “Operators can enter and extract items from their locations more quickly,” points out Israel Jacinto Gertrudiz.

Work planning has also been decisive for Grupo Morsa, boosting the daily preparation of between 350 and 600 orders at each of the three facilities. Each level in the warehouses is assigned a specific number of operators, which varies according to the demand and the number of open orders to be prepared. With this system, several purchase orders can be completed simultaneously.

To do so, operators walk down the aisles, collecting the products that make up each order directly from the racks. They follow the order grouping method, which consists of preparing several orders at the same time on the same route.

Three new warehouses

Grupo Morsa is going through a time of unprecedented expansion, as evidenced by the opening of three new warehouses in Mexico. Committing to Mecalux storage for picking with walkways has allowed it to triple its storage area, saving significant space costs.

At the same time, this storage for picking is ideal for storing and picking small SKUs, as is the case with Grupo Morsa’s spare car parts. In these three warehouses, a total of 46,000 are managed and, in each of them, between 350 and 600 daily orders are prepared.

Advantages for Grupo Morsa

• Triple the useful surface area for storage: the racks support raised aisles that make up a total of three floors, accommodating a greater number of products.
• Optimal goods management: direct access to the products is essential to facilitate the preparation of between 350 and 600 orders/day.
• Storage of multiple boxes: 46,000 SKUs of different sizes and turnover are managed in the three warehouses.