DC Velocity - June 2009

equipment

The tight deadlines put a lot of stress on Schreiber’s order fulfillment operation. “Our old method of handling Target orders was to actually pull all the product and line it up on the floor,” Nash says. “It took up a tremendous amount of floor space. We would have people taking labels

and going skid to skid applying labels to cartons and transferring the cartons to another skid. To accomplish this required a lot of people and a lot of overtime.”

The manual system also led to mislabeling, which resulted in chargebacks from the customer. “We had to

be faster and more accurate,” Nash says.

To address these problems, Schreiber decided to invest in an automated labeling and sortation system to handle the Target orders. Nash is candid about the reasoning. “Any time you use a machine instead of a person, you become more reliable and accurate, and you save on labor,” he says.

After reviewing its options, the company decided to go with a compliance labeling and carton sortation system from Cornerstone Automation Systems Inc., or CASI. The system provides automatic shipping labeling, a software interface to Schreiber’s software management system, and sortation software plus hardware that includes accumulation conveyor, scanners, a bi-directional heavy-duty case sortation system, and label applicators.

The system was installed about three years ago.

Scan, sort, repeat

Today, Target’s orders flow smoothly through the facility with minimal human intervention. Orders received from the retailer are released from Schreiber’s homegrown enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the CASI system. The Schreiber system produces a separate pick ticket for each destination DC.

Workers scan the cartons as they place them onto an accumulation conveyor, where the cartons are staged in zones ahead of the labeling section. The system spaces the cartons for optimum system speed and squares up the cartons to ensure proper label application.

In-line scanners read the Schreiber bar code and send that information back to the ERP system, which then identifies the product and relays the information to the printer. The printer produces a Uniform Code Council (UCC) 128 compliance bar-code label in the customer’s preferred format and applies it according to the customer’s requirements. (In Target’s case, that means that on cartons less than five inches tall, the label must be applied one inch from the bottom.) Another scanner reads the label to ensure it is legible and in the right location.