materialhandlingupdate CONVEYORS
The garments are next placed onto a hanging garment
sorter supplied by SDI Group, a manufacturer of sorting
and conveying systems. This device, which can handle
5,600 garments an hour, sorts the garments to 44 hanging
destinations, according to garment type and putaway aisle.
Once the items have been sorted, an operator hangs the
garments onto trolleys, which are then picked up by a
Daifuku/Jervis B. Webb-manufactured Unibilt monorail
conveyor. The monorail carries each trolley through a
three-level module (the hanging garment sorter is located
on the module’s bottom level) to a predetermined putaway
location. The trolley is taken off and rolled into a position
for putaway. The garments are stored in the module by
type, with pants in one area, shirts in another, and so forth.
A PERFECT FIT
In the meantime, other workers are busy assembling incoming orders. Customers are measured for tuxedos at The
Men’s Wearhouse stores. The rental order information is
then fed to the DC for fulfillment, where it becomes a reservation. The orders in Pittston are accumulated and
processed in waves using pick tickets that specify the size,
color, and style of each item in a reservation. Articles are
added to the order as it travels through a three-story tower,
or picking module, until the complete package is assembled.
The pants, located on the third level, are picked first.
There, a worker selects the proper garment from the storage racks and places the pick ticket on its hanger. The pants
are then placed onto a powered hanging conveyor manufactured by Pep Conveyor Systems for transport through
the pants area. From there, they are transferred to another
Unibilt monorail that takes them down to the second level.
On arrival, they transfer to a Pep conveyor to travel through
that level, where employees read the pick tickets and add
shirts and then vests to the order.
At the end of the module, orders go back on the Unibilt
monorail for transport to the bottom level. There, the
reservation is hung on a rail and slid along through coat
selection. A garment bag is added to the hanger, and shoes
are placed into a pocket on the garment bag.
At this point, the fully assembled tux is ready to leave the
picking module. It is then slid on the rail to a quality control station, where a worker verifies the order and scans the
bar code on each item to “assign” it to the finished tuxedo.
A shipping label is printed and placed into the clear pocket
of the garment bag. All of the items are then put into the
bag, which is zipped closed.
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TUXEDO JUNCTION
About 20 percent of the garments processed at Pittston are
rush orders that require expedited handling. These tuxes
are slid manually on a rail from the quality control area to
the small-parcel area for packing. At packing stations, six
tuxedos at a time are placed into a flat carton, which is
sealed and deposited onto roller and belt conveyors that
feed a small push sorter. The sorter diverts the cartons to
four ship stations designated for parcel pickup.
The remaining 80 percent of the garments are hung onto
trolleys that are wheeled from quality control to a staging
area, where the tuxes are sorted by store. The tuxes are then
placed onto a shipping trolley designated for that store and
the paper reservation for that tux is added to the trolley.
The trolley is pushed to a door for loading onto 53-foot
trailers. The trailers, which are part of the Men’s Wearhouse
fleet, have rails built into the trailer beds to allow the trolleys to be wheeled directly onboard. Trailers are sent to
consolidation hubs, where the trolleys are removed, routed,
and wheeled onto 26-foot company-owned delivery trucks
for store delivery.
So how has the new conveyor system worked out? Quite
well, by all accounts. Since moving to an automated system
for processing tuxedo rentals, The Men’s Wearhouse has
been assembling its tux orders more efficiently and with a
high degree of accuracy. “The big thing was defining the
criteria. W&H did a very good job of that,” says Andrew
White, senior director of engineering at The Men’s
Wearhouse. “There were no surprises once we got to imple-
menting the system.”
You might say these systems are well suited to the retail-
er’s needs. ;
