With a daily circulation of 280,000 and 357,000 on Sunday, we deliver to much of Northern California. In 1992, we transferred 75 percent of our circulation volume to distribution warehouses, enabling us to load bundles into Cannon carts and make deliveries in larger Class B trucks equipped with lift gates. The change reduced costs and, more importantly, allowed earlier delivery times.

The remaining 25 percent of circulation is delivered in one-ton vans or step-side trucks. The problem is these bundles have to be hand-loaded into trucks that don’t match our dock height—both time consuming and labor intensive. Drivers deliver the bundles to field offices, where they are offloaded. Carriers then back up to the warehouse one at a time and load bundles into their private vehicles. The paper is handled four times before it’s delivered to the customer.

We organized a team of drivers, supervisors and managers to find a low-cost solution to the problem. We had several obstacles to overcome:

• How do we move a cart from a dock built for a commercial truck to the lower height of our vans and trucks?

• Once on the vehicle, how could carts be offloaded at our field offices?

• How can you maneuver around the vehicles’ wheel wells?

• How can a single-copy employee work in the vehicle with carts in the way?

After several modifications to our existing carts, we finally developed one that works—it fits over the wheel wells of small step vans. Along with implementing dock lifts to transfer carts to any size truck, some field offices are now equipped with multi-ton pallet lifts and metal cart platforms (see pictures).

The new equipment has allowed us to expand from delivering 75 percent of our circulation in some sort of container to about 90 percent.

Tim Tracy is the Bee’s packaging and distribution manager. E-mail, TTracy@SacB.com; phone, (916) 321-1814; fax, (916) 321-5240.