materialhandlingupdate CONVEYORS
items, making them a good match for e-commerce.
However, they typically cost more than the more popular
roller conveyors. And not every company is willing to shell
out for the more expensive systems, especially if they
already have a roller conveyor that they’re hoping to repurpose for e-commerce operations.
One way to get around this is to batch-pick items into a
tote, according to Kelly Reed, a partner with the consulting
firm Tompkins International. The totes can then be transported by traditional roller conveyors to a unit sortation
system or put-to-order module, where the items are allocated to individual orders and packaged.
After the orders are packed, orders in cartons can be separated from those packed in polybags or envelopes, Reed
says. The polybag or envelope orders can be deposited back
into a tote and routed to a shipping sorter, where they can
be manually sorted for shipment.
Justfab: From carts to conveyors
Not only are totes an economical option for companies
looking to make use of existing equipment, but they’re also
a good fit for those retailers that sell a mix of products. One
such company is online women’s fashion retailer JustFab.
Most of the company’s volume consists of shoes, which can
be easily transported on roller conveyors in shoeboxes. But
the company also sells soft goods, such as jeans, purses, and
accessories. For these items, the company uses totes. (See
sidebar for more on JustFab’s fulfillment operations.)
The majority of JustFab’s orders are packed in corrugated
cartons. The remainder are polybagged and handled manually, using a process similar to the one described by Reed.
“Polybags are such a small percentage of our business that
we chose not to [automate] it,” says Bert Hooper, JustFab’s
vice president of operations. “We tote up our sealed polybags and send them to a manual shipping station, where
our employees apply shipping labels and sort them into
gaylords [large reusable corrugated containers used for shipping].”
If a facility has no choice but to use
roller conveyor for transporting small
bagged items, Kraus recommends that
the rollers have tighter roller centers than
the standard three to four inches. He also
suggests setting any sensors used with the
conveyor to detect small items.
On top of that, the company should pay
particular attention to catch points—
places on the conveyor’s frame where the
bags might get snagged. These include
corners, guardrail “transition” areas, and
areas where one piece of sheet metal overlaps another. Rigid cartons are less likely
to get snagged or drag on these points
than a bag, which conforms to the shape
of whatever you set it on, says Kraus.
When it comes to the front-end selling experience, the online women’s
retailer JustFab has always been tech savvy, with a Web operation that
pushes monthly recommendations for shoes and handbags tailored to a
customer’s personal style. On the back end, however, the pure-play e-commerce retailer was—until recently—anything but high tech.
Bert Hooper, the retailer’s vice president of operations, recalls that
when he joined the company in June 2011, its Louisville, Ky., warehouse
was an entirely manual operation. While that worked well enough when
the company was starting out, it was becoming increasingly clear JustFab
would have to automate in order to stay competitive. “You get to the
point where it’s costing you too much money to manually process the
order,” says Hooper.
JustFab needed to reduce its variable labor cost per unit and its cycle
times in order to stay in the game. In addition, it had to come up with a
more efficient way to handle multiple unit orders (when a customer
orders more than one item at a time) than simply sending associates out
to collect items on carts. After weighing its options, it installed 1,500 feet
of conveyor and sortation systems from Intelligrated, along with various
other systems.
Today, JustFab’s DC associates pick directly onto the conveyor system.
The orders then travel to the sortation system, which diverts multi-unit
orders back to the “binning” area to collect the remaining items, and
sends single-unit orders and completed orders on to the packing area.
The sortation system has six divert lanes for multi-unit orders, with 200
bins per divert lane. This means the company can have up to 1,200 multi-unit orders in the system at one time, flowing between picking, packing,
and shipping. This is in addition to the 1,000 single-unit orders that the
system is concurrently handling.
As a result of the shift to the new system, JustFab has been able to
keep up with its rapid increase in volume. Since 2011, the company has
grown from an operation with 200,000 units in inventory that processed
2,000 orders per day to one that handles 1 million units of inventory and
8,000 orders a day.
SORT IT ALL OUT
As is the case with conveyors, the best
sortation systems for brick-and-mortar
fulfillment may not be the best ones for e-commerce fulfillment.
Mitch Johnson, director of systems
development for Hytrol Conveyor Co.,
notes that typically, sorters in DCs that
supply retail stores are set up to handle
200 orders. This works well in a store fulfillment environment, where those 200
orders may contain thousands of items.
But in an e-commerce operation, the
average order only contains 1. 5 items. If
your systems can only process 300 items,
you aren’t going to be able to keep up
with the volume and velocity requirements of e-commerce, Johnson warns.
