tribution. “If you don’t do it right,
they might as well be 2,000 miles
apart.”
And it was clear that the pressure
would only increase as business
grew. After looking at its options,
the company decided to relocate its
distribution operations to a 1. 1 mil-
lion-square-foot facility in Coppell,
Texas, not far from the Dallas-Fort
Worth Airport. Among other
advantages, the site is located just
eight miles from the previous DC,
which allowed the company to keep
its entire workforce.
This building should meet the
company’s needs for the next 10
years and allow it to serve nearly
double the number of stores it cur-
rently supports. Right now, The
Container Store occupies 800,000
square feet of the leased facility,
with the option to expand as growth
demands. It is using some 720,000
square feet of that for distribution
purposes and the remainder for
corporate office space.
“WHOLE BRAIN” THINKING
From the outset, the retailer decided
against simply replicating the previous system and work flow in the
new building. Rather, it would use
the move as an opportunity to
rethink the fulfillment process from
the ground up. For help with that
endeavor, The Container Store contracted with Malin Integrated
Handling Solutions, an Addison,
Texas-based integrator and material
handling equipment distributor.
What The Container Store did
next might raise some eyebrows, yet
it’s completely in keeping with the
retailer’s unique approach to management—an approach that has
landed it on Fortune magazine’s list
of “100 Best Companies to Work
For” for 12 years running. It decided to bring in employees to help
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with the decision making—a strategy
Coronado refers to as “whole brain thinking.” In this case, it formed teams of some
of the people who move the products every
day and asked for their input on the facility
design and equipment selection.
The design ultimately selected represents
a radical change to the company’s
approach to storage as well as the lift
trucks used in its operations. In the old
building, The Container Store utilized nar-row-aisle racking, set with aisles five feet
wide, and relied on a fleet of eight turret
trucks to move goods around the facility.
The problem with that arrangement was
that it limited access to the aisles to only
those vehicles.
“Once the vehicle was in the aisle, no one
else could use that aisle,” says Coronado.
So when they went to design the new
process, the teams from The Container
Store and Malin began with a clean sheet of
paper, starting with the products the facility would handle and then designing the
system around them.
“We designed what we felt the facility’s
layout should be, then our slotting strategy
determined what racking we would need
for each SKU type. Once the racking was
determined, we then defined what vehicles
would be needed to service them,”
Coronado explains.
The design teams also had to consider the
seasonal nature of many of The Container
Store’s 10,000 products, such as holiday
wrapping paper and the office organization
products sold during tax preparation sea-
son. To help it navigate the slotting com-
plexities, the company uses its Catalyst
warehouse management system to assign
products to different types of racks, which
include pallet, push-back, pallet-flow, and
case-flow racks. “The goal is to get our best
movers during each time of the year closer
to the dock door. It is something you have
to keep up with,” says Coronado. “You can
be perfect today, but it will still need to
change tomorrow.”
The way the racks are positioned in the
new building differs from the setup in the
old facility. Instead of the five-foot aisles,
the new storage area has 11-foot aisles
between racks. This allows multiple vehi-
cles to access the racks simultaneously.
