forward pass. In late 2010, the company signed a
licensing deal to supply hats for the National Football
League (NFL) starting in 2012. Under the agreement,
New Era is now the official hat provider for NFL
teams and all of their many merchandising channels.
Picking up the NFL agreement would nearly double
the volume that Harrisburg would have to handle.
That meant New Era would need to find a way to
double its throughput capacity without increasing the
footprint of the building.
And that wasn’t the only challenge the headwear
supplier faced. Around the same time, New Era
was seeing a major shift in customer ordering patterns. Rather than ordering in bulk and maintaining
extensive inventories, customers were trimming their
stocks to just what was required to meet their immediate needs and relying on suppliers to ship replenishments on a more frequent basis. As the trend took
hold, New Era’s customers shifted from ordering
items in pallet- and case-load quantities to cartons
containing multiple SKUs that have to be picked
individually. Trouble was, the Harrisburg DC was not
built with piece picking in mind.
Filling the additional orders under the old methods would require a big increase in labor and a lot
of added expense. New Era realized that it needed
to change its order fulfillment process if it wanted to
remain efficient and competitive.
TACKLING THE OPPORTUNITY
With the start of the football contract looming,
New Era began drafting a new game plan for the
Harrisburg facility. But it only had about six months
to do it. You could say that the clock was already in
the fourth quarter.
New Era and Menlo approached Fortna, a ware-
house design and engineering firm, to evaluate the
existing distribution process and then devise a com-
prehensive plan for renovating the DC and installing
automated systems. Among other goals, they wanted
a process that would improve overall service while
reducing operating costs by at least 25 percent. And in
the best baseball tradition, New Era also threw Fortna
a curve—installation of the new systems would have
to be completed in a three-month period while fulfill-
ment operations continued as usual.
“Installing and upgrading this facility during opera-
tions was definitely a challenge,” recalls Holker. “The
key to that was really extensive planning and coor-
dination with the customer, with Fortna, and with
Menlo. Project management was critical. Reviews
were about every other day in terms of making sure
that everyone was aligned.”
The solution that Fortna came up with called for
the installation of the company’s own warehouse
control system, new pick modules, RF (radio-fre-
quency) picking, efficient pack stations, a shipping
sorter, a “dynamic pick” area for expedited order
processing, and new value-added service areas. The
project was carried out in phases, so that one section
of the building was renovated while work in another
section continued under the manual processes. The
entire implementation was completed within the
three-month timeframe.
“Five years ago, this was a 100-percent manual
distribution center; now it’s highly automated and
sophisticated—run by software and hardware. It has
totally changed how New Era does business,” notes
Joe Stein, director for logistics and distribution for
North America at New Era.
SEASONS OF CHANGE
Operationally, there was a silver lining to landing
the NFL contract, as it helped to balance out what
had been a fairly seasonal business for New Era.
Previously, most products were shipped in the spring
and summer to coincide with baseball season. Now,
the three-shift facility handles more predictable volumes year round.
The hats themselves are manufactured both overseas and domestically. Among the factories is a
facility New Era operates in the hat capital of Derby,
N. Y., which is famous for having introduced the der-by-style hat to the world.
