French fashion and home furnishings retailer, Eurodif, has addressed the challenges of mixing ‘single piece’ replenishment for stores with ‘full carton’ deliveries by bringing two types of sortation technology together in one integrated system.
Eurodif is a €197m turnover French fashion and home furnishings retailer serving the mid-market. As part of Groupe Omnium, a family owned holding company, Eurodif is one of four fashion brands within the group along with Devred, a men’s clothing retailer, Bouchara, a home textiles chain and Burton, a name well known in the UK clothing sector.
Despite their shared focus on retail, each business is run autonomously with each responsible for brand strategy, marketing, merchandising and operational decisions.
From its origins in Brest in 1980 Eurodif has expanded from the North West of the country to just about every major conurbation across France and now has 85 stores strategically placed in city centres, selling a diverse range of women’s and children’s ready-to-wear clothing, fashion accessories, lingerie, household linen, furniture, and home decorations.
But these stores are not the conventional inner city sized units – they are large at around 1000 m2 and require fast and efficient replenishment to meet market demand.
The Problem
The world of fashion is fast moving, ranges change with ever greater frequency and if products are not available at the retail store on time, sales are lost. Ensuring that store fulfilment and replenishment takes place with the utmost efficiency is critical to both revenue and profitability.
Management at Eurodif realised they needed to make a step-change in the way they ran their store fulfilment and replenishment operations. Sending complete cartons for store replenishment was not the best approach for fashion retailing and resulted in poor use of inventory, a slow and unresponsive supply chain, and unnecessary costs. The company needed to move to a system that offered the stores what they required – replenishment in single pieces. That way laborious unpacking and shelf replenishment processes would be avoided in-store and goods could be re-stocked quickly, securing more sales.
Delivering in single pieces would take a new distribution strategy and new infrastructure – a distribution centre kitted out with state-of-the-art order picking and sortation technology, feeding more frequent deliveries to stores.
However, having such a diverse product range created complications. Home furnishings and textiles were suited to full carton deliveries, so the new operation needed to cater for both single items and cartons to optimise performance.
The solution
Strategically, Eurodif realised they needed a central location to serve their stores and opted for constructing a new 24,000 m2 distribution centre near Troyes, to the south east of Paris.
After an extensive consultation and tendering process, in October 2011 the company took the decision to commission a highly automated solution from warehouse automation specialists, SDI Group. Two of the company’s latest sorters were to be deployed – SDI’s TTU bomb-bay/split-tray sorter for the high-speed sortation of single items and SDI’s LS900, a highly versatile and fast tilt-tray sortation system capable of handling a wide variety of loads – in this case cartons.
By utilising the specific capabilities of both machines orders for stores would be brought together in a sequenced manner. The TTU (tight turn unit) would sort single items into multi sku cartons per store and then these cartons would be transferred by conveyor to the LS900 which would merge and accumulate cartons from both the TTU and the full carton inventory. Store orders would then be prepared as pallet loads and despatched.
Installation got underway in February 2013 and the system was fully operational by the end of June. Despite the constraints of building the system in the midst of the continuing phases of construction work, the project was completed on time and to budget.
Now successfully in place, the TTU sorter offers Eurodif the flexibility to scale their single item order processes to varying patterns of demand. With the capacity to sort up to 28,000 pieces an hour the bomb-bay style sorter delivers goods to 120 chutes, with busy stores often assigned two or more chutes, depending on orders. In future the sorter may well be used for preparing internet orders using a two stage sortation process. However, at this point in time, internet sales are at an early stage.
The LS900 tilt-tray carton sorter is a robust unit designed for low-maintenance and uses proven SDI Group technology to deliver packages and loads up to 35kg at a speed of 70m per minute. At Eurodif the LS900 is used to sort cartons at a rate of up to 4000 items an hour, but of the 120 chutes available on the machine only 90 are used for outgoing orders. The remaining 30 are deployed to sort incoming goods arriving in mixed container loads from overseas.
The benefits
“Investing in SDI technology has enabled our company to replenish our stores more frequently and in a way that is in tune with the needs of the individual store. Stock rooms are less cluttered and delivering in single items, as well as in full cartons, makes it easier for staff to re-stock the shelves,” says Eric Helies at Eurodif. “The efficiencies gained have made us more responsive and therefore more competitive in the market place, helping us to meet the increasing demands of our customers and securing the continuing profitability of the company.”
By adopting automation to improve store replenishment, Eurodif has ‘future proofed’ its supply chain, giving the retailer the capacity to expand its store network into further urban areas and new markets. Having a flexible solution that allows Eurodif to scale operations according to demand makes the best use of resources, enabling the company to fulfil store orders at the lowest unit price.
Helies says, “ SDI Group performed as they said they would, meeting deadlines, providing an efficient build programme and integrating the machines with few teething problems. The team have done well to bring this project in on time and to budget. We now have a fulfilment operation that is fit for the future.”
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