Super-Streamlining High-Speed Throughput In Retail Apparel Distribution
The Children's Place' latest 700,000 square-foot distribution center recently opened in Fort Payne, Alabama with a material handling system by Dematic, features 50,000 linear feet of state-of-the-art automated conveyor, four high-rate sortation units, a 2,600-store-location put-to-light order fulfillment system and full-case crossdocking capability.
The new DC is nothing short of a model for super-streamlined, high-speed, retail apparel distribution.
By Jim McMahon, Zebra Communications
For The Children's Place, the task was straightforward - build a new distribution center to help supply its expanded number of retail apparel stores in the southern United States, and relieve some of the distribution load on its other three North American DCs to speed up store delivery times across the continent. With a net increase of 250 The Children's Place stores over the past 5 years, the new DC could not be too soon to arrive. Add to this the necessity to replenish store product several times a week, and conduct full store change-outs monthly, it was clear that this new DC was destined for a dose of high-tech super streamlining to meet the high-speed throughput demands assigned to it.
The Children's Place
The Children's Place Retail Stores, Inc. is a leading specialty retailer of children's merchandise. The company designs, contracts to manufacture, and sells high-quality, value-priced clothing, accessories and merchandise under the proprietary The Children's Place name. The company owns and operates over 900 The Children's Place stores in North America, as well as an online store at www.childrensplace.com. In fiscal year 2008, net sales for the company exceeded $1.6 billion.
The Children's Place offers colorful, trend-right fashion and coordinated outfits specifically designed for children from newborn to age ten. It creates freshness in its stores by introducing seasonal merchandise lines throughout the year. The shopping environment is convenient, bright and airy, and family-friendly. Display racks and shelves are neatly arranged to distinctly separate each department and provide easy viewing of the latest collection.
At The Children's Place, apparel tops, bottoms, jeans, dresses, underwear, swimwear, sleepwear, outerwear, uniforms, footwear, school essentials and accessories are sold. All of these product SKUs are handled through the company's four North American retail distribution centers located in New Jersey; California; Ontario, Canada; and now Alabama.
Planning a Better Distribution Center
Having previously built three other distribution centers to service its retail stores, The Children's Place had the advantage of drawing on this experience to make the newest facility in Fort Payne its most efficient. In fact, the company has always built each new distribution center better than the ones before it — learning from improvements and more streamlined systems of handling product flow — then integrating these solutions into its new DCs.
"While we were in the process of site selection, we already knew what we wanted as a layout for this distribution center," says Don Whiteford, Director of Engineering for The Children's Place. "Lessons learned from our prior DCs were designed into this one. For example, as the number of stores increased, it became more efficient to switch to a put-to-light system, which we are using in Fort Payne, where 2,600 locations are used to consolidate product destined for each of our stores. SKUs are brought to these locations, instead of the other way around with pick-to-light, which was used in an earlier DC."
"We turn over our merchandise monthly and sometimes even more often," explains Frank Loewen, Senior Director of Logistics for The Children's Place. "We update our look in the stores frequently, due to seasonality as well as the need to provide freshness for our loyal, repeat customers. We build about 12 different floor sets throughout the year."
"We also have a short sell-window for seasonal items," Loewen states. "When we get an allocation to replenish product, we need to get it into those stores quickly so they have more time to sell. We often replenish stores several times a week."
"We brought Dematic in to manage the material handling part of the DC," continues Whiteford. "The Fort Payne distribution center is the fourth facility where Dematic and The Children's Place have worked together and they fully understand our throughput requirements. Dematic engineered the latest system to meet the projected throughput requirements of the DC from receipt through shipping. This includes conveyors at receipt, throughout the DC and shipping, sortation equipment, pick systems, print-and-apply, mezzanines, and the warehouse control system to operate and monitor the equipment."
"The DC was a Greenfield project," concluded Whiteford. "We started clearing the land in October 2006, Dematic was on-site installing equipment the following February, and we had our opening in July of 2007. It was a very tight timeline."
Automated Receiving, Streamlined Crossdocking
The automation starts at receiving. More than 90 percent of The Children's Place' product comes to the DC in ocean containers. Each container has its own ASN (advanced shipping notice) which is linked to the Warehouse Management System (WMS). The container is backed up to a receiving line where automated conveyor systems are used to unload the containers. The cases are inducted into the system with a percentage being audited for accuracy. Each of the cases has a vendor specific label, which is a unique identification for that specific case. This gives the DC the ability to precisely track its inventory via Dematic's warehouse control system (WCS). These labels are read and synchronized by WCS to effect real time, high-speed routing through the DC. The cased product is either crossdocked to shipping, or conveyed to the racking area for store distribution.
The Fort Payne facility is equipped with an extensive and efficient crossdocking system, representing 40 percent of its total product throughput in the DC. Full-cased product is received, conveyed and diverted through a high-speed sliding-shoe sorter and transported to the label print and apply (LPA) system where outbound shipping labels are automatically applied. These cases then proceed directly to the shipping sorter where they are routed down one of 42 lanes to the appropriate shipping destination without ever touching the floor or being added to storage. This gives The Children's Place more storage capacity and shortens turn-around time for shipments to its retail locations.
Full-Case and Broken-Case Picking
Aside from crossdocking, there are two other ways that The Children's Place sends product out of the Fort Payne DC – either full-case, or less than full-case. Full cases come out of the 60,000 pallet location rack system, and go directly on the DC's four dedicated "slapper" lines, through the LPA system for labeling and straight to shipping. Less than full-case orders are consolidated by the DC's put-to-light modules.
The put-to-light system is bringing SKUs to a specific location for a specific store. In this case, 2,640 put-to-light locations are used to hold product destined for each of the stores. The picking begins in a tote-build area consisting of 24 stations where full cases are opened, de-cased and the product assigned to totes. The pick area is located on 156,000 linear feet of mezzanine platforms.
The totes are then fed into a Dematic RS Series high-speed sliding shoe tote sorter and sorted into one of 40 put-to-light lanes. The products are processed into shipping cases for specific stores. Full cases are then sent outbound onto another RS Series high-speed sliding shoe sorter into the LPA area. A shipping label and carton-content label is automatically applied to each case, which is then transported to a RS Series sliding shoe sorter for the designated shipping area and automated loading.
High-Speed Sortation
In the Fort Payne DC, four RS Series Dematic sliding shoe sorters give high-speed, accurate package handling up to 180 cases per minute. Interleaving extruded aluminum slats provide a wide, flat carrying surface that prevents jams. This allows the sorting of a broad range of product sizes and types, with quiet and positive sortation and ultra-high throughput.
The four sliding shoe sorters in the facility present The Children's Place with high-speed sortation in receiving, tote build, LPA and shipping.
Smart, Energy-Efficient Conveying
50,000 linear feet of power conveyor was installed in this DC, designed and manufactured by Dematic. The Dematic modular, belt conveyors can transport goods of widely divergent weights and sizes on the same conveyor and also have an increased ability to handle difficult-to-transport items like poly bags, which are frequently used with apparel.
"The Dematic modular, belt conveyor offer superior package control and can maintain precise gapping between conveyable items" says Kathryn Penno, Sr. Project Manager with Dematic. "The uniform spacing leads to fewer package jams which reduce product damage. Jams also cause increased system downtime, more than mechanical and electrical failures. In contrast, most roller-accumulation conveyors allow more than one package to fill a zone. This may create problems since the zone will treat several packages as a single package, causing jams and side-by-sides. Using the Dematic solution, without changing hardware, the user can select a desired gap for maximum buffer, for sorting, or for proper pitch prior to an in-line scale. The user can also select the speed from 70 feet-per-minute up to 400 feet-per-minute."
"Small modular belt sections with intelligent controls on the conveyor mean that if packages are too widely dispersed - some packages too close to each other, some too far apart - the conveyor adjusts spacing appropriately," continues Whiteford. "When a package that is too far behind the package in front of it, enters a short modular section of conveyor with a photo eye, that conveyor section speeds up the belt and the package zooms up to the appropriate spacing. If a package is too close to the one in front, the conveyor slows down. In short, accumulation with superior package control improves the overall system performance."
The conveyor also has the ability to automatically turn itself off when it is not needed. This is a tremendous capability for energy savings. Compared to conventional conveyor systems, it reduces power consumption up to 30 percent, reduces labor up to 20 percent, and conveys a wider variety of product. Integrated distributed controls provide diagnostics and new levels of user control, with system and unit adjustments to maximize performance and reliability.
"We wanted the Dematic conveyor for a number of reasons; it is the latest and greatest in conveyors and we have never been shy at purchasing state-of-the-art equipment," says Whiteford. "The Children's Place is always concerned about environmental conditions, and when we are running that much conveyor there is a pretty big electric bill."
Dematic also provided automatic pressure accumulation conveyors (APC). Coming off of the sorter, they are used to temporarily stop, hold, and release material. They allow product accumulation along a line without pressure buildup. A 15-foot slug is indexed into a decline belt that keeps all the gaps between packages closed.
Warehouse Control System
Dematic's SortDirector® is being used for the warehouse control system (WCS) which provides state-of-the-art graphic system monitoring for the entire conveying operation. It gives operators real-time control of product movement, and real-time reporting.
It integrates with the WMS and coordinates all product movement inside the distribution center. SortDirector runs on a Windows-based Pentium PC using an SQL database. It was developed using modular components of code to make it easily configurable. Providing graphic system monitoring for the entire conveying operation, it gives operators unparalleled real-time control of product movement, and real-time reporting.
At a glance, users can identify system status and easily diagnose material handling equipment issues. It gives a full layout view of the system, which displays the operating conditions of material handling components by color coding. To access more detailed information, users can select a component to display additional information and options. It is also Internet enabled for ease in remote viewing.
The Benefits
"At our DCs, we measure our efficiency on a cost-per-unit (CPU) basis," says Loewen. "This is hourly wages against each unit that we send out. There is a gauge that we follow and it is based upon seasonality and what is projected for each DC at that time. Our CPU is between 2.5 cents and 4.0 cents per unit. The new DC has not been in operation long enough to get really hard numbers on CPU, but we do see significant throughput improvements, specifically on the receiving side. The biggest improvement that we have seen so far is increases in our receiving capacity and throughput by almost 50 percent over our other DCs."
"We have been processing, on the outbound, over 2.5 million units shipped per week," continues Loewen. "This is being done on one shift. Before we opened up the Alabama DC, our average transit time was over 3 days. When we opened Alabama, this was reduced to less than 2 days, which represents about a 40 percent reduction in delivery transit time to our stores."
What's next? The Children's Place is now looking at expanding its e-commerce capabilities and is looking at automated solutions to keep up with the rapid growth of its on-line business.
About Dematic Corp.
Based on a rich tradition of over 70 years of worldwide industry expertise in creating logistics results and more than 10,000 systems installed worldwide, Dematic Corp is the world's leading supplier of logistics automation solutions, systems and service.
Beginning with Rapistan's rich history from gravity conveyors to automated, modular conveyor and sortation solutions, Dematic now offers a full range of engineered and highly configurable system solutions that optimize warehousing and distribution operations. With Dematic, companies can reduce distribution costs, maximize overall logistics efficiencies, and increase the operating speed of their supply chain.
Dematic is a global company with operations in 22 countries around the world. Its North American headquarters is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For genuine Rapistan conveyor system parts, or more Dematic information, visit www.dematic.us.
Jim McMahon writes on logistics automation.
His feature stories have appeared in hundreds of industrial and high-tech publications throughout the world and are read by more than 5 million readers monthly.
He can be reached at jim.mcmahon@zebracom.net.