Installation helps Selfridges to record Black Friday Peak

In 2018, AMH Material Handling was asked by DHL to complete additional work to the Hams Hall site. Assam Khan, operations manager at DHL explains: “Selfridges’ e-commerce operation is continuously growing each year. As a result, we needed to expand on AMH Material Handling’s initial installation in order to keep up with the demands and meet worldwide customer delivery times.

“Selfridges approached us and said they needed to increase their e-commerce throughput. As a third party logistics provider, it was down to DHL to source the equipment to achieve this. We realised that we needed to expand the number of workbenches on-site to increase throughput and therefore commissioned AMH to complete the additional work to accommodate this.

“We decided to move the store retail operation on the ground floor to the far side of the facility. This freed up a significant amount of space enabling AMH to install two additional conveyor feeds to the despatch line. This allowed us to add an additional 60 benches on the ground floor – significantly increasing packaging throughput.

“Our peak week for e-commerce is Selfridges’ ‘Christmas Comes Early’ (CCE) week which is essentially its Black Friday week. We had planned to process 50,000 units per day but we actually hit 58,000 units per day and we wouldn’t have been able to manage this without the extra workbench area installed on the ground floor. AMH also installed a maintenance platform for the raised despatch sortation system to provide safe access so any faults can be quickly and easily rectified.”

Future-proofing

“This year, Selfridges came back to us and predicted another significant increase in e-commerce throughput for 2019. In order to prepare for this year’s CCE week, AMH came back onto site and replaced old obsolete belt conveyors on mezzanine level 2 and installed new replacement conveyors to feed the powered decline spiral conveyor. This has allowed us to make both the ground floor and level 1 our main processing floors with the option of opening up level 2 as we need it. During peak periods all three floors run at full capacity for 24 hours a day. 

“AMH also extended the despatch platform and installed an additional two new chutes – taking the total of despatch chutes to six. The despatch chutes cover all our UK and worldwide couriers as well as in-store click and collect.

“The new three floor automation system has increased efficiencies not only by making room for additional workbenches, but also by improving the site layout and allowing us to store products more efficiently. This reduces walking distances for personnel and avoids the need to pick orders across multiple floors. Furthermore, the despatch sortation system has removed the requirement to manually sort parcels by destination which would have been problematic with the growth Selfridges is experiencing. 

“The e-commerce system that AMH installed for us handles on average 6,000 orders per day, but then accommodates our peak period where orders increase significantly to 20,000 per day. As well as an increase in orders, the automation and sortation system is able to accommodate 29 different box sizes for both eCommerce and click and collect parcels with no issues.”

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