PUTTING together one of the country’s biggest buildings on time and in a way that met tough environmental and financial constraints was a major achievement for McLaren, the developers of Andover’s megashed – but new tenants, the Co-operative Group, say that was the easy bit.

Running a complicated distribution hub to cater for the Co-op’s 431 stores in an area bounded by Yeovil, Oxford and the western fringes of the M25 is no easy task.

The complexity of the task is compounded given that the lorries will have to carry frozen, chilled and ambient temperature goods and need to be loaded to a tight schedule with exactly what each shop desires – and in a paperless environment where temperatures can plumb depths of minus 24 degrees C.

Such is the Co-op’s expertise that military logistics top brass from neighbouring HQ Land Forces have even been for a tour of the facility to see how things are done.

Training hundreds of new workers cannot be achieved overnight but the first 83 are already on the payroll and the first goods have been delivered by suppliers and stored on the miles of racking “Stock has started to build up his week and we go live on June 6 but it won’t be until after the Christmas that we will be fully operational moving around 1.3 million cases a week,” said Mark Leonard, Co-op’s head of logistics for the south.

“By Christmas there will be 500 people in the warehouse and a lot of people are going to be new and will have all had a two week induction with a training plan for every individual.”

The Co-op has a standard rate at which people are expected to work using the radio frequency voice recognition system but new pickers will only be expected to work at 40 per cent of this rate during their first week, rising by increments to 100 per cent over a 12 week period.

Co-op says its wages are in the ‘upper-quartile’ for this kind of work and despite Andover’s allegedly tight labour market, the job advert setting out the basic terms yielded 1,200 applications. Local concern about lorry movements provided one of the biggest stumbling blocks during the planning process and distribution centre general manager Graeme Evered promised they will abide by the rules laid down.

“Number plate recognition is in place and there is a maximum number of vehicles that can travel in one hour and we can’t go outside of that as it leads to a fines process,” he said.

“There are certain roads that our suppliers and our vehicles are not allowed to use and we have been busy putting our suppliers in the picture.”