BY PETER BRADLEY,
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
problemsolved
Problem: Creating more DC
slots without adding space
The Problem: British fashion retailer River Island faced the classic growth challenge—at least where its distribution operations were concerned. After 60-plus years of
operating brick-and-mortar stores, the
company had jumped into international e-commerce. While the venture was proving
successful, the added volume was straining
the capacity of its 466,000-square-foot DC
in Milton Keynes, northwest of London. The
company did not want to enlarge the facility, nor did management want to add a DC
elsewhere in the country. Rather, it wanted
to find a way to expand the existing building’s capacity.
What the retailer mainly needed was a
storage system that would allow it to make
better use of available space. But it had
another requirement as well: The system
would have to provide easy access to SKUs to
allow for swift order picking. Like most
fashion retailers, the company turns product
rapidly. Arif Ahmed, director of logistics for
River Island, says orders for stores and
express shipments must leave the facility
within 24 hours, or within 48 hours for standard delivery.
rear of a pallet bay while allowing easy
access to the items inside. It consists of vertical shelving columns made from industrial textiles. The columns are suspended from
tracks installed in the racks, allowing the
columns to slide sideways to provide access
to additional columns deeper in the rack. In
the River Island installation, the columns
run three deep.
Each column can bear loads of up to 240
pounds, and each slot in the columns can
hold up to 30 pounds. The columns are
custom designed for each installation and
can be installed in any new or existing pallet rack.
At the River Island facility, Apex Linvar,
which is the European distributor of
SpeedCell, installed a total of 24 SpeedCell
bay sets. Those provided an additional
5,000 SKU locations in a single aisle that
had previously accommodated 742 SKUs.
Doing so freed up 12 aisles for higher-vol-ume products, says Doug Buma, president
of the Holland Awning Group of
Companies, the parent of Holland Storage
Systems and its European division, Holland
Storage Systems BV.
The installation took two men about five
days, according to a SpeedCell spokesman.
(The company notes that installation times
have dropped as it has gained experience—
the standard now is 45 minutes per bay with
two trained installers.) Ahmed reports that
the system required effectively no training
for his staff. “Intuitive is the word that
comes to mind,” he says.
“It was a natural progression of an idea
that has been used in logistics for a while:
simple but effective slot matrix shelving,”
Ahmed adds. He lauds the system for its
flexibility and excellent cube utilization. ;
THE
PLAYERS
CUSTOMER
River Island
Primary business:
Mass-market fashion
retail, with more
than 300 stores in
the U.K. and Ireland
and throughout
Asia, the Middle
East, and Europe.
The company also
runs a growing
international
e-commerce
business that ships
to more than 100
countries, including
the United States.
Headquarters:
Milton Keynes,
Buckinghamshire,
U.K.
The Solution: For help with the
problem, River Island turned to Apex
Linvar, a manufacturer and distributor of
DC storage systems that is also based in
Milton Keynes. Apex Linvar recommended
that the retailer retrofit a number of its
floor-level pallet racking bays with a mobile
storage and picking system called SpeedCell.
Manufactured by Zeeland, Mich.-based
Holland Storage Systems LLC, the
SpeedCell system is designed to convert traditional racking bays into high-density storage modules, eliminating dead space at the
SUPPLIER
Holland Storage
Systems BV and
distributor Apex
Linvar
SOLUTION
SpeedCell Storage
Solution
