DC Velocity - March 2011

MATERIAL HANDLING EQUIPMENT
specialreport

It’s all in the carts

For furniture retailer American Signature, the secret to doubling
DC output was the humble—or in this case, not-so-humble—cart.

THERE’S NO WAY AROUND IT. MOVING A BIG COUCH or dining room table or armoire into, through, and out of a distribution center is necessarily a cumbersome process.

And when you multiply that task by, say, a million items per month, it starts to sound like a monumental material handling challenge. But for retailer American Signature Inc., moving all that furniture is no problem. In fact, it’s all part of the daily routine.

It hasn’t always been that way. A few years back, the company was struggling to find a way to move large furniture items that wasn’t awkward, slow, unsafe, or damage prone. In 2008, it finally hit upon a solution. Today, the retailer is able to whisk even the biggest and bulkiest items through its Ohio and Pennsylvania facilities at double the rates it achieved in the past.

GROWING PAINS

What started the company down this road was growth. Since its founding in 2002, the Columbus, Ohio-based

company, which operates both the American Signature Furniture and Value City Furniture chains, has undergone rapid expansion. Today, it has some 125 stores in 19 states.

To serve these stores, the company operates five distribution centers—located in Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. The DCs, which range in size from 300,000 to 600,000 square feet, only stock about 4,000 to 5,000 SKUs apiece, but they carry vast inventories in order to fill store orders rapidly.

The DCs are high-volume operations—collectively they handled about a million pieces of furniture and other goods in December, which is just a bit above normal, according to Todd Deutsch, the company’s director of DC inventory systems and continuous improvement. And because every piece is handled by a person, order fulfillment at these sites is a labor-intensive process, he adds.