Over the past decade, the retail industry has had to adapt to the changing nature of demand. Whereas customers have traditionally valued choice, quality and competitive pricing, now they also demand convenience, reliability and speed of service – with the ability to browse, shop, collect and return goods wherever and whenever they want. The logistics challenges thrown up by these developments are huge – but not insurmountable, with the help of automation.
GROCERIES
The food retail sector faces the continuing growth of online sales, the demands of ever-changing promotional activity and the emergence of new products. Flying in the face of traditional fears over lack of flexibility, advances in technology have allowed significant elements of supermarket warehouses to be automated highly successfully – thereby cutting costs and improving lead-times.
This automation can involve the picking of full trays or cartons of product, picking of individual items from trays or cartons, or picking of units from pallets. KNAPP has supplied a full-case picking solution to the leading Swiss grocer, Migros, at its distribution facility in Zurich, where an OSR Shuttle™ system acts as a storage and picking buffer. For single item picking from trays or totes, incoming goods are first depalletized – either fully automatically or semi-automatically – and then placed in an automated store, from where they are retrieved and sent to a goods-to-person workstation.
Picking of goods directly from pallets has traditionally been difficult to automate but KNAPP has developed a brand-new solution in co-operation with Spar for use at its distribution centre just outside Vienna. The solution – Pick-it-Easy Move – enables ergonomic and efficient picking of fast-moving products directly from pallets using the goods-to-person method. In contrast to conventional systems, the decanting process is eliminated. A moving shuttle with integral operator platform moves automatically between sixteen target locations – eight on each side – featuring roll containers on lifts. With both the pallet and the roll container automatically adjusted for height, there is no need for lifting at all. Pick-it-Easy Move allows picking of up to 600 cartons per hour and also indicates exactly where each picked item should be placed for optimum space utilisation.
CLOTHING
The diversity of the ranges stocked by retailers today mean that suppliers offering expertise in both flat and hanging garments are especially interesting to retailers. With Dürkopp Fördertechnik as a group member, KNAPP has been able to secure key contracts in the UK market recently. Dürkopp’s technology for the overhead conveying and sortation of hanging garments is used by many blue-chip retailers including Marks and Spencer, ASDA, John Lewis, Sainsbury’s, Primark, Debenhams, Zara and H&M. For the storage and picking of flat-packed garments and accessories, KNAPP’s OSR Shuttle™ system is highly efficient. Batch-picked goods can be separated into individual orders at ergonomically designed Pick-it-Easy workstations. Here, pick-to-light technology is used to pick goods into multiple totes – each containing a separate customer or store order – with light curtains able to detect when goods are placed into the wrong tote. This is the solution that KNAPP has supplied to Hugo Boss at the company’s new distribution centre in Filderstadt, Germany.
KNAPP’s award-winning Pick-it-Easy Pocket is an innovative solution that is ideally suited to e-commerce applications. It allows flat-packed goods and hanging garments to be processed together – for the first time – on the same system. Consisting of hanging pockets – suitable for flat-packed clothes, shoes, accessories, books, DVDs or toys – on an overhead conveyor, the system uses a matrix sorter to ensure that the pockets arrive at the packing stations in the correct sequence to collate each customer’s order. The pockets can be fitted with RFID tags and the solution can process up to 10,000 items an hour. The solution is paying dividends for clients such as SeD Logistique in France and Brax in Germany.
RETURNS
The ever-increasing volume of goods sold via the Internet has made the problem of returns more significant – especially when it comes to clothing. Returns handling is another area in which automation scores highly. KNAPP supplied a huge OSR Shuttle™ system to Hermes Fulfilment in Germany for use as an automatic returns solution for its e-commerce and mail order sales. The automated store features 176,400 locations with capacity for about one million items.
Phone: 01844 202149
Email: sales.uk@knapp.com
Web: www.knapp.com
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