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Serco wins by losing weight

25 Jan 2016

For Serco, the challenge was losing weight in the body of the meat hanger truck while not compromising its strength and durability. If they achieved this, they got an additional order. If not, they would lose out.

SPH meat hanger

Serco designers went to work examining the old meat hanger body to see where they could shave off as many kgs as possible.

"A key element for the customer, SPH Transport Services based in Cape Town, who specialise in the transport of meat and fish nationally, was increasing the payload to 14 tons on a MAN 25.280 chassis, so we needed to do our sums carefully," said Serco managing director, Clinton Holcroft.

"We re-looked at the different components used in the construction of the body such as the reinforcing in the roof, how we drill and tap the meat rails into the steel. We put more reinforcing in the floor so we could save on the weight of the sub-frame and incorporated lighter engineered beams for the side wall which didn't weigh as much as the meranti wood we used previously,' said Holcroft.

The end result was an impressive weight saving of just over 700kgs on an 8.5m body. Serco built three of the meat hangers for the client.