equipment&applications
BY SUSAN K. LACEFIELD, ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR
CONVEYORS
a need for speed
As its empire grew, apparel retailer Children’s Place had to face facts.
Not only did it need another DC; it needed a streamlined, high-speed
automated facility that could handle millions of units a week.
LIKE MANY OF ITS YOUNG CUSTOMERS, THE APPAREL CHAIN CHILDREN’S
Place had been experiencing a growth spurt. In just five years’ time, it had added 250
stores to its North American network as part of an aggressive push into the U.S. South.
The strategy succeeded. But by 2005, the strain was starting to show in the back
end of the operation—the distribution centers that serve the stores. At the time, the
retailer’s DC network consisted of just three facilities—located in New Jersey,
California, and Ontario, Canada. Because Children’s Place stores (which now number more than 900) must be replenished several times a week and their merchandise
completely changed out at least monthly, those DCs were already hives of activity.
With each store opening, the pressure mounted. It was evident the time had come to
open a new DC.
In order to improve service to its new stores in the South, the Children’s Place chose
Fort Payne, Ala., as the location for the new facility. Among other advantages, the site
offered room to build the kind of mega-DC the retailer envisioned—a facility that
would occupy 700,000 square feet.
In addition to being supersized, the new DC would be highly automated. The retail-
er’s plans called for installing a high-speed state-of-the-art material handling system—
one capable of processing millions of units a week with minimal human intervention.
And there was one other requirement: The center would have to be built fast. In order
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