American Apparel is a California based fashion brand dispatching around one million garments a week. Faced with fast growing sales of its ‘affordable basics’ and constrained by its facilities in Downtown Los Angeles, the company decided to move from its manual operations in a multi-story building erected in 1917 to a 225,000 sq ft single story distribution centre in La Mirada, California, kitted out with the latest FSU sorter from SDI Group.
The move has been a long-time coming, says Drew Evans, Director of Distribution. “A lot of companies that are this size either work with third parties to distribute their goods or have distribution centers in multiple places.”
The Downtown facilities were cramped, at capacity and were arranged over seven stories, with only small freight elevators and stairs. All product was moved manually and employees worked from order sheets, collecting goods by hand and pushing carts through aisles of static racking.
The new ‘state of the art’ warehouse in La Miranda uses bar code technology and high levels of automation to ensure accuracy and speed in fulfilling e-commerce orders to its global customers. The central element of the operation is a ‘Bomb Bay’ fast sortation system called the FSU, designed and installed by SDI Group through the company’s US operation, SDI Industries inc. “We specifically chose a supplier for our automation equipment that was based in Los Angeles, both so they would be close to us and because we thought it was important to reinvest the money locally,” says Evans.
SDI Group’s FSU is a highly innovative, flexible sorter with the capacity to sort up to 20,000 items per hour. It has the ability to ‘scan on the fly’, read RF tags in line, and is fabricated using carrier trays made of either metal or plastic. By using plastic carrier trays the FSU can read RF tags with much higher accuracy.
A development on the established ‘Bomb Bay’ design, the SDI Group FSU sorter installed at American Apparel has a drop point accuracy of 99.9% and sorts to 300 destinations at high speed. But it is the FSU’s inherent flexibility – designed in through removing the need for chains or belt drives – that makes the sorter suitable for a wide range of applications – especially, those with space constraints. A power saving design feature of the FSU is its modular motors that are used on start up and then idle until power is needed again.
American Apparel’s new distribution centre in La Mirada has given the company the capacity to meet customer expectations into the future and is expected to bring substantial operational savings.
SDI Group Ltd
Amanda Dowsett, Marketing Manager
Tel: 01763 244 299
Email: amandadowsett@sdigroup.com
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