Sorting the fashion industry
Sorters from Beumer have allowed a wide variety of fashion retailers to push the envelope in terms of deliveries.
Fashion has always been a fast industry but now it has to work even faster to fulfil customers’ changing expectations. The main drivers for this change are the online and mobile technologies which offer retailers a more integrated, omni-channel approach to engage with customers throughout the buying process. To meet this demand, fashion retailers are using increasingly sophisticated automated sorting systems located in Centralised Distribution Centres (CDC). These systems not only support faster turn-round of orders, they also support a more globalised fashion industry and can add to bottom-line profits by reducing operating costs.
Flexibility and economy
Ensuring the most efficient use of automated sorting technologies is crucial to adopting a faster and more flexible warehousing and distribution model.
For example, the high-speed BEUMER Group automated tilt-tray sorter in Gloria Jeans’ CDC in Novoshakhtinsk, Russia, has the capacity to handle 25,000 items per hour. This throughput enables Gloria Jeans to make two deliveries per week to each of its 400 retail outlets located across the vast area of Russia and the Ukraine.
The sorting system achieves this through automated batch sorting of garments, by destination, directly into despatch cartons. These cartons are then automatically closed, labelled and palletised, eliminating slow manual processes and replacing them with a faster and more streamlined automated system.
The ability to configure an automated system to match the specifications of each individual distribution centre, and to maximise the use of space, is an important factor in areas where land prices are at their highest.
At 200,000m2, NIKE's China Logistics Centre, near Shanghai, handles the shipments throughout mainland China. Despite its size, BEUMER Group added some features to the design of the LS-4000CB cross-belt sorter to reduce the footprint of the sorting area. These features include specially designed chutes.
It was another kind of flexibility which led fashion retailer, New Look, to base the new material handling system in its UK distribution centre on the LS-4000CB sorter. The high-speed sorting system has the flexibility to operate at three different speeds. This enables the sorting capacity to be optimised to match demand and to combine fast delivery with reduced power consumption and a lower maintenance overhead. For many companies, the innovative energy-efficient Linear Synchronous Motor (LSM) technology in the LS-4000 sorters is an additional advantage. The motors achieve a reduction in power consumption of up to 80% compared to conventional linear motor drives to make a significant contribution to lowering operating costs.
Serving a global market
The globalisation of the fashion market means that retailers can optimise the use of their automated materials handling assets by using the same sorter to serve customers across different time-zones. Some companies now run their sorters for up to 22 hours per day, 7 days per week. This not only increases the overall capacity and productivity of a CDC but supports later order cut-off times for customers.
Fashion retailer and online pioneer, ASOS, installed an LS-4000CB cross-belt sorter in its UK-based global distribution hub in 2013. As part of a fully automated system this enables ASOS to distribute 50 million garments a year to customers in over 90 countries.
Sorting returns
In addition to streamlining the despatch of orders, automated sorting systems can be used to increase the speed and efficiency of the returns process. The returns rate in the fashion industry can be as high as 40% so moving returned items back into available inventory is a major factor in the overall efficiency of a CDC.
Automating the returns process can provide significant savings. Instead of simply being used to sort and route items to the correct despatch point the same high-speed sorter can be used as an intelligent transport link between the despatch and returns processes. The returns are processed at a workstation and then inducted into the sorter which transports them directly to consolidation for storage or to a despatch point. Using the sorter in this way eliminates a number of manual operations which increases throughput as well as reducing cost.
The flexible use of high-speed automated sorting systems in the CDCs of fashion retailers is changing the way in which the fashion industry is fulfilling the expectations of tech-savvy customers. With faster turn-round of orders, these back-end fulfillment systems complement the omni-channel communication which is becoming an integral part of the browsing and buying process.
