PERFORMANCE PROFILE
A DC VELOCITY SPEED CHALLENGE
Hitting the docks running
ANYONE WHO HAS BOUGHT PRODUCTS THROUGH EBAY KNOWS
how important timeliness and accuracy are to those transactions.
The company built its reputation on quality customer service. The
same holds true with eBay Enterprise, an eBay Inc. company and
a provider of omnichannel solutions. These include commerce
technologies, order management, retail operations, and marketing services. eBay Enterprise acts as a third-party provider of
fulfillment and distribution services for clients that include The
Company Store, SteinMart, New York & Company, GODIVA, and
VF Corporation. eBay Enterprise has
a number of distribution centers in
Martinsville, Va., and two of them
have just added new Beumer tilt
tray shipping sorters to speed products to consumers.
“We ship everything from a
pair of earrings to lawn furniture,”
explains Kim Smith-Glisson, direc-
tor of operations. “The customer
experience is our number one goal,
so we needed the ability to move
products through our outbound
sortation systems much faster. We
have a wide variety of packaging for outbound shipments, every-
thing from envelopes to polybags to large cartons; so we needed
something that could handle that wide variety.”
Obviously, the lawn furniture doesn’t fit on the new sorters,
but almost everything else does. In the older facility, known as
Martinsville-I, the new sorter replaced a 30-year-old pop-up unit
that wasn’t able to sort all of the various packaging.
“The old sorter didn’t have the capabilities, speed, or accuracy that the new one does, which meant more manual labor in
handling bagged products and ensuring accurate sortation,” says
Bradley Feury, senior manager, process improvement.
That is particularly important, as both facilities process a
large amount of apparel and other products that ship in
bags. The Martinsville-I building packs nearly 80 percent
of items in bags, while Martinsville-III handles about
30 percent bagged shipments. The new tilt tray
sorters provide accurate and precise handling of these bagged
products.
No downtime permitted
One of the requirements for replacing the sorter in Martinsville-I
was to make the changeover without any disruption to service.
To accomplish this, the new tilt tray sorter was erected above the
former pop-up unit, with just enough clearance to allow the tallest
boxes to divert. Changeover took only an hour and a half, and
most of that involved rerouting the
incoming conveyors.
The new sorter travels at 2. 1
meters per second and features 81
trays that feed nine diverts. Capacity
quadrupled – from 1,500 packages
an hour on the pop-up to 6,000 per
hour on the tilt tray. Accuracy is now
well above 99 percent. Even with
much higher throughput, the sorter
has allowed labor in the shipping
area to be cut in half.
Only 36 hours after the new sorter began operating in Martinsville-I,
“In that facility, we went from a rate of 200 packages per hour
on a single inline scale and scanner to 3,000 packages per hour.
That has helped us to meet the demands of our clients during the
peak [holiday] season,” says Feury.
The sorter in Martinsville-III has 65 trays and seven diverts. The
beauty of a tilt tray is the wide range of products the trays can
hold – anything up to 48 inches in length and weights from 3 ½
ounces to 70 pounds.
Both systems are designed with expansion in mind, so even
higher volumes can be accommodated. The speed of processing
also means that many products now ship a day earlier than before,
which results in a better customer experience.
“We can now hit those 5:30–6:00 cutoffs, while completing
pack-out at basically 5:00. Prior, it was about three to four hours
for packing to be done. Now, it’s about 22 minutes,” adds Feury.
ADVERTORIAL
New sortation systems have equipped eBay Enterprise with greatly expanded throughput
capabilities, while handling its wide variety of shipment package types and sizes.
