Single item picking

With over 15 years’ experience in this field and local operations in Europe, Russia, Asia and the USA, Arvato has established its reputation as a leading eCommerce expert, providing B2C and B2B logistics for fashion, beauty and retail clients.

One client served by Arvato at its distribution centre in Langenhagen, Germany, is C&A. From humble beginnings in 1841 as a textile warehouse in Holland, C&A has grown into a huge fashion retail organisation with 1,575 shops in 21 countries worldwide and more than 35,000 employees. At the Langenhagen facility, Arvato processes all the orders placed through the C&A online shop from several European countries using an automated handling system supplied by KNAPP.



When a customer places an order online for either home delivery or ‘click and collect’, the automated solution picks the single items in the warehouse and supplies them in the correct sequence to the packing stations using KNAPP’s Pick-it-Easy Pocket matrix sortation system. This award-winning solution features a large number of bags – the ‘pockets’ – suspended from an overhead conveying system. Items such as shoes, accessories and flat-packed clothing – in fact, anything that would fit into a shopping bag – are picked into the pockets, which are then sequenced by the matrix sorter. In this process, goods are passed over an integrated scanner for their barcode to be read; from this moment on, the unique article data is allocated to the pocket’s RFID transponder and used to track and identify the item as it travels through the warehouse. Hanging garments can also be attached to the pockets via a special device. The solution – which can process up to 10,000 items an hour – uses a matrix sorter to ensure that the pockets arrive at the packing stations in the correct sequence to collate each customer’s order.

Naturally, the rapid handling of returned goods is very important for C&A. Returns are checked, repacked and then put back into the system at special goods-in stations. Buffer conveyors transport the pockets to the matrix sorting area, which sorts the returns together with the pockets of other picked goods, with the returned items being given priority for fulfilling customer orders.

With the introduction of the Pick-it-Easy Pocket system at the Arvato DC, the manual sorting processes were eliminated and walking distances slashed, thereby achieving faster delivery speeds and higher picking performance. Installation of the system was carried out during ongoing operations, without impeding day-to-day business activities.