The hats arrive in Harrisburg in containers
and trucks. After they pass through receiving,
they head to reserve storage in pallet racks unless
needed immediately for picking areas. The picking
zones contain a combination of carton flow racks,
deck racking on the bottom levels of pallet racks,
and bin shelving. Products are assigned to specific
locations based on their volume and velocity. For
example, most of the faster-moving products are
housed in the carton flow racks.
Following instructions relayed via RF devic-
es, workers pick items into cartons arranged on
wheeled carts. Once all the items are gathered,
Rush orders are handled in a sec-
tion known as the “dynamic pick”
Flow racks here have 1,200 densely packed loca-
tions. As in other areas, picking here is directed by
RF. Packing is handled at adjacent stations, with
most cartons shipping with fewer than six hats.
One of the more interesting features of the
facility is the 30,000-square-foot “heat seal room.”
If you’ve ever wondered how championship hats
are ready for sale so quickly after a team wins the
World Series or Super Bowl, that’s where special
“fast response” processes like heat sealing come
into play. Rather than preproduce winning hats
for both teams, which would result in tremendous waste, New Era waits until the outcome has
been decided before swinging into action, affixing
championship patch decals to caps using special
heat-sealing machines. Workers in this light manufacturing area actually watch the sporting events
on large monitors so they can begin work the second a champ is crowned. As for how quickly this
takes place, workers in New Era’s heat seal room
can turn out 40,000 hats in a single shift.
Once orders are completed in all areas, the prod-
ucts are conveyed through a sawtooth merge in the
conveyor line that feeds value-added workstations
and pack stations located on an upper-level mezza-
nine. At the pack stations, hats are checked, print-
outs and labels are produced, and the packages
are sealed. The completed cartons are then placed
onto a takeaway conveyor that transports them to
a pop-up shipping sorter. The sorter diverts the
cartons to seven lanes for shipment worldwide.
HATS OFF TO THE NEW SYSTEM
Today, over 14 million hats flow through the
Harrisburg facility annually, with nearly 70,000
picked and packed daily during peak season. The
automated equipment has been instrumental in
helping New Era handle that volume, with
room to grow.
The new system has also
helped the company adapt to
the shift toward smaller, more
frequent customer orders.
A typical order now consists of about six lines, with
about seven hats per line.
Many of the orders for large
retailers are also packed and
labeled for individual stores so that
they can be swiftly cross-docked upon arrival at
the customer’s DC without further processing.
On top of that, the new system gives New Era the
flexibility to set aside certain picking cells for special processing to meet the demands of individual
customers.
Although throughput has increased, processing
times have been greatly reduced. Orders are now
processed in hours as opposed to days under the
old system. All the while, the cap distributor has
kept a lid on operating expenses: Though the facility is now handling double its previous volume,
operating costs have dropped by 30 percent.
Even better, the entire project was delivered
under the original budget. That brought New Era
a very handsome return on investment (ROI)
of 1. 5 years, which was also six months ahead of
schedule—making the project a grand slam all
around. c
Editor’s Note: After this article was published, Menlo
Logistics and its parent company were acquired and
rebranded as XPO Logistics.
DAVID MALONEY IS CHIEF EDITOR OF DC VELOCITY.
