DC Velocity - October 2010

Next PLC

When it needed to boost logistics productivity, Next, one of the United Kingdom’s largest clothing retailers, decided to give goods-to-person picking a go. It installed an AS/RS that is connected to high-rate put stations at its DC in South Elmsall, England. The gambit paid off. Once the new system was in place, picking productivity increased by 300 percent.

The system, which was supplied by Dematic, stores fast-moving apparel items, footwear, accessories, and home goods. When needed for orders, products are automatically retrieved and conveyed to one of the system’s 20 put stations. Within each station, 24 order totes are staged, each representing a different store. Workers follow a light-direct-ed process to select items and place them into the proper totes. The remaining product is then sent back to the storage system until needed. Completed orders are pushed off onto takeaway conveyors that whisk them to shipping.

The result is a fast, productive system for filling store
orders. Workers are able to pick up to 1,000 items per hour,
which is three times the rate they achieved back when they
had to search the shelves for products.
boasts 3,520 storage locations, holds cabinet hardware, wall
plates, and other items in totes. These items are picked as
individual pieces, mainly to fill specialty and online orders.
Liberty made the switch in a bid to boost efficiency and
make better use of space. Under the old system, employees
picked products from flow racks in a traditional pick mod-
ule onto carts—a method that required a lot of walking.
“The big issue for us was travel time. This eliminates it,”
says Tom Turner, Liberty Hardware’s vice president of glob-
al logistics. “[The new system] also allows us to fit a larger
amount of stored product into a smaller footprint.”
Among other benefits, the new system has improved
order accuracy. Because only the items needed for orders
are delivered to the stations, accuracy now stands at better
than 99 percent. The system offers security advantages as
well, since only the storage/retrieval machine can access the
product totes.

But the biggest gains of all have come in productivity and labor savings. With the new system, Liberty is able to fill about 80 orders an hour, a very high rate for complicated piece picking, and it does it with fewer people. “We have been able to reduce our labor over 50 percent from the oldstyle methodology,” reports Turner.

reducing overall storage space requirements. For another, they boost accuracy. With goods-to-person systems, only the goods needed for orders are delivered to operators, cutting down on the chances workers will pick the wrong items.

Other advantages include improved ergonomics and safety. With this approach, workers no longer have to carry cases from place to place; the storage machines and conveyors do the heavy lifting. In addition, lift truck traffic is reduced, resulting in a safer work environment.

As for equipment, goods-to-person systems come in a variety of forms and configurations. They can incorporate pallet-based (unit load) automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), tote-based miniload systems, carousels (both horizontal and vertical), robots, and vertical lift modules. (For purposes of this story, we’ll concentrate on automated storage and retrieval systems, both pallet- and tote-based.)

To date, goods-to-person picking has been successfully employed in a range of industries, including retail, pharmaceutical, grocery, apparel, industrial parts, meat, dairy, and medical. What follows are four examples of companies that have successfully adopted this approach.

Liberty Hardware

Like Next PLC, Liberty Hardware saw productivity soar when it shifted to a goods-to-person picking approach. In September 2009, Liberty installed an automated AS/RS from Daifuku at one of its distribution facilities in Winston-Salem, N.C. The one-aisle miniload system, which

Spar AG

Spar AG, one of Europe’s largest grocery chains, has done more than just pay lip service to the goods-to-person approach. It has backed up its words with cash, investing heavily in automated storage systems for its distribution center in Wels, Austria. The 900,000-square-foot facility, which holds both dry food and non-food items, serves 1,500 stores, most of which are small shops that handle less-than-case quantities.

The facility boasts a number of automated systems supplied by TGW Systems and Witron. They include a high-bay AS/RS system for storing pallets, Witron’s Dynamic Picking System for less-than-case quantity selection, Witron’s Ergonomic-Dynamic Picking System for picking cases, and another AS/RS miniload system to sequence shipping.