If you are the kind of person who has difficulty finding a pair of matching socks in the morning, spare a thought for staff at the new Lifeboat Support Centre in Poote In this one giant building the RNLI stores spares for lifeboats, hovercraft and beach lifeguard units, stock that fundraisers need, from collecting boxes to flags, and domestic goods, such as loo rolls and packets of soup - 750,000 items in all.

Sitting at their computers above the warehouse, on the second floor of the Lifeboat Support Centre in Poole, are Ruth Gentry and her team. At first glance they look like any other office workers, a million miles from the all-action world of lifeboat launches and daring rescues. Ruth is Supply Chain Manager and she and her 52 colleagues are responsible for storing and distributing virtually everything needed to support every lifeboat station, beach lifeguard unit and fundraising branch in the UK and Ireland. Ruth also manages procurement. It is her team's job to buy from the RNLI's 900 or so suppliers, to get the best value and quality possible.

Emergency service The warehouse staff are part of that team.

They operate a 24-hour duty system so that urgently needed parts can be picked from the warehouse and loaded for delivery within half an hour of a call, 365 days a year. There are nine drivers who between them can visit every lifeboat station in the country every two weeks. In 2003 the RNLI lorries clocked up around 306,000 miles and the smaller vans 102,000 miles.

When equipment breaks down it is the team's job to bring it back from the coast and decide whether to repair or replace it.

This is not a throwaway culture,' says Ruth.

'If we can repair something and it is economical to do so we will repair it, rather than throw it away and buy a new one.' In an age when most commercial companies keep their stock levels to a minimum and rely on 'just-in-time' delivery by suppliers, Ruth says business people are often shocked that £7M-worth of stock is kept in the RNLI's warehouse. 'It is because we are talking about lives,' she says. 'I can't say to anyone "I'm sorry you can't launch that lifeboat because I haven't got a spare pump for the engine."That would be unacceptable. We are an emergency service and stock must be available every day, come what may.1 Moving house Last year was a challenge for the warehouse team. In seven days they moved the entire contents of four different stores into the new building.

Detailed planning started in 2000. The warehouse needed to be big enough to hold the contents of all four old sites. The newdesign had to take into account the various weights, sizes and categories of the 16,000 different part numbers normally kept in stock. Some of the items, such as flares, are so potentially dangerous to store that they must be handled differently and stored especially securely.

The building is an impressive sight inside and out. Storage stacks run up to 9m high in some places and storemen reach the highlevel stocks on narrow aisle trucks. They have been trained to abseil to the ground on ropes, in case a truck were to break down.

There are three mezzanine floor areas for storage of small items in open plastic boxes, plus a cantilever racking area for storing long, thin items such as 4m propeller shafts and long fenders, and a wide aisle section for bulky objects such as complete engines.

The move started with hundreds of thousands of items from the old buildings at the Poole depot, ranging from tiny radio transistors to three-tonne lifeboat engines.

At the move's peak, a 12m lorry was filled, driven and emptied every 35 minutes.

'Moving a warehouse is a nightmare,' says Warehouse Project Manager Paul Bolt, who led the team that designed the warehouse and planned the move. While the move was under way it was an effort to know precisely where every key part was located. 'But,' says Paul, 'you have got to be operational at all times. You cannot afford to mislay anything in case it is needed.' With the new building came a newly devised computer system, new equipment, a new team structure - and new responsibilities for virtually everyone in the 24-strong warehouse team, some of whom had been in their job for nearly 30 years. 'It was very difficult and quite stressful for people,' says Paul. 'It hasn't all been sweetness and light. But they have done exceptionally well. There is still some tweaking to do to get it spot-on, but I reckon we are 85 to 90 per cent there.' The upheaval of the move did affect the distribution of fundraising stock, as Margaret Harrison, Regional Office Supervisor for the North points out. She says: 'We often need things like flags, jackets, buckets and other publicity materials for events but when the move happened, there were teething problems. We did not get everything we asked for.' Ruth Gentry adds: 'Everyone involved in the warehouse relocation are to be commended for their achievement particularly in their forbearance during the testing early days of "usual" stores operation.' Challenging times The target is to make sure that 93 per cent of the stock that is required in the warehouse is there all of the time.

What about the people who need those items to directly save lives at sea - are they happy with the service provided by the Lifeboat Support Centre? 'It is a really good system and is working well,' says Vince Jones, Lifeboat Mechanic at Moelfre, Wales.

'Often you find you need items urgently, whether it is a pack of pager batteries or an inshore lifeboat engine. The fact that it is now quicker and easier to get those items from Poole is very positive.'.