Roger Eke on the worst 4-weeks of his working life and the day he discovered the true importance of good wayfinding signage.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the area, the Wirral is a peninsula in North West England. It is bounded by three bodies of water: to the west the River Dee, forming a boundary with Wales, to the east the River Mersey and to the north the Irish Sea. It was here I spent the 4 most miserable weeks of my working life!
I was on site with our installation team to manage the delivery of a wayfinding signage package for a new-build supermarket distribution centre. This was a very impressive construction project. A huge logistical hub with 67 loading bays for articulated lorries and a vast maze of warehouse shelving full of hundreds of thousands of products, all costing around £20million. The centre would be manned by hundreds of staff, many of whom were employed to load cages full of products from the various warehouse zones and then take them to the appropriate loading bay to be delivered to the correct store. I’m sure I’ve simplified the logistical process somewhat but that’s the gist of it!
Our role was to deliver all primary Wayfinding and Health & Safety signs - a project worth around £50,000. We were on site for nearly 4-weeks between mid-January and mid-February and, as I’ve already mentioned, I was having a miserable time! The Wirral is undoubtedly an area of outstanding natural beauty, but even the locals will tell you that the winter months can be bitter. This year it was particularly horrible; the temperature struggled to get above zero and the cold wind from the Irish Sea made it feel much, much colder. Coupled with this I was away from home for nearly 4-weeks, hundreds (it felt like thousands!) of miles away from my friends and family and, to be honest, I was feeling a bit sorry for myself! Quite frankly, I was itching to get home.
As the 4-weeks drew to a close though, I had a wholesale change in feeling. With our part of the project complete a couple of days early we got the chance to see this new distribution centre swing into action. It was incredible how the vast and complex logistical challenge of delivering hundreds of thousands of products a day to stores across the UK could be done so efficiently. It was then that I had my Eureka moment – without our signs, this huge, efficient and well oiled machine would come to a complete standstill. Even something as simple as the numbering of the loading bays meant that HGV drivers could easily find their parking bay from the outside and the staff could easily load the correct cages into the correct lorry on the inside. It sounds insanely simple but without these numbered signs, the place would be chaos – it just wouldn’t work.
In the grand scheme of things our part in this project was fairly small – at a value of £50,000 it was a mere 0.25% of the overall budget for the project. On the other hand, the impact of our product was huge and without it, this £20million construction would have been a complete failure. Realising that our contribution was business critical for the client completely turned my experience in the Wirral around. It gave the whole team a real sense of real purpose, pride and ownership in what we’d helped achieve.
Since then I’ve realised that the same can be said for any project we’re working on whether it be delivering the signage for Blackfriars Station, or installing 33,000 units at Heathrow’s T5. Okay, passenger terminal projects call for a slightly more complex approach than numbered loading bays, but the principle is the same – without our product it would be chaos! Signage might be a small part of the delivery of a new large-scale transport or construction project – but its impact is enormous and far-reaching.
Roger Eke from Merson Signs has worked in the signage industry for 8 years, delivering projects including Underground Stations at Wood Lane, Marble Arch and Notting Hill, in excess of 40 Overground Rail Stations and a number of multi-site signage projects including the Somerfield and Kwik Save DDA implementation across 1,500 stores throughout the UK.
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