It is essential to us that the products we sell arrive with our customers in good, working condition. Many of the items we sell are both valuable and fragile. Parts are often required by customers on site urgently to fix mission critical issues so they do not have time to wait for a replacement. With all of this in mind there has been a huge amount of investment in recent years in both our warehouse setup and the packaging we use, with bespoke boxes for certain items designed in collaboration with our packaging suppliers.
Storage
The 48,000+ items we currently have in stock are all stored in our warehouse in Newton Abbot ready to be dispatched the same day. These include brand new items boxed and put directly onto the shelves. All none boxed items are stored in anti-static bags in containers and slot boxes of various sizes allocated to certain types of products in order to keep the items safe. This ensures heavier items such as power supplies aren’t stored with lighter, easier to damage components.
Some products require an even greater level of protection due to their fragility and high value. In the case of system boards and LCD panels multi-slot boxes are used to keep items separate and prevent damage when they are removed or placed into the box.
We take our data protection obligations extremely seriously and multiple processes are in place to ensure no storage device is sent out with data still on it. Each hard drive is stored with its individual test report which includes a one pass wipe. Warehouse staff make sure this is present before a drive is sent out. If the test report has got separated from the drive or is otherwise missing, the drive is sent back to test before being despatched.
Packaging
Whether we are shipping a product to a customer 8,000 miles away or just up the road all of our items are packed in a way that affords them a high level of protection. Brand new foam lined boxes in a range of sizes are used to protect items ranging from heatsinks and wireless cards to system boards.
Hard drives are shipped in boxes featuring central foam surrounds, different parts of these can be removed to encase anything from a 2.5″ laptop drive up to server hard drives in caddies. You simply remove the shape you need depending on the size of the drive.
Blade servers are shipped in boxes we designed in collaboration with one of our packaging suppliers. The various removable hard foam cut outs perfectly match the shape of the blade.
Finally excess space in boxes are filled using wrap produced by our air fill machine. This can also be used to protect larger, heavier items such as printers that do not fit into any of our regular foam boxes. They are instead shipped in double wall boxes filled with this wrap. It is incredibly strong and able to take the weight of a person walking on it without breaking.
