THE CUTTING-EDGE OF FASHION FULFILMENT
SDI Group is a £60 million global integrator of automated material handling systems specialising in the fast moving world of fashion retail. With over 30 years of experience in designing, fabricating and installing complex conveyor, sortation and order picking solutions, the company is one of the world’s leading providers of technologically advanced systems for both hanging garments and flat goods.
SDI Group offers a full range of services from consulting, design, engineering, and fabrication to installation, integration and aftermarket maintenance and support – everything that is required to drive a high performance distribution centre.
One of SDI Group’s most striking recent innovations is the MonaLisa pouch sortation system. Developed over the last 18 months, from concept to commissioning, the highly flexible, dynamic buffering and hanging pouch system is perfect for onmi-channel retailers, enabling the carriage of both hanging and flat product in a single pouch. But where it is really taking off is in handling returns. In a sector where returns can be up to 50%, buffering returned items using the MonaLisa dramatically cuts time and effort in processing goods for resale, creating a far more responsive returns process that drives sales and boosts margin.
A WORLD FIRST Another recent product innovation is a ‘world first’. The automated ‘Empty Hanger Sorter’ has been developed by SDI Group to solve a major headache for some of the world’s largest retail brands – recycling and processing empty coat hangers returned from retail outlets. The highly advanced system uses ground-breaking camera technology to identify a hanger from over 80 different profiles in under 300 milliseconds – whilst on the fly – and then automatically sorts them onto rails where they are accumulated by type. The innovation is fast revolutionising the labour intensive operation of sorting empty hangers returned from high street retail outlets, bringing efficiency gains and major cost savings.
THE LS900 TILT TRAY INNOVATION Then there is SDI Group’s latest tilt tray sorter, the LS900. Designed to enhance DC operations, the LS900 is capable of handling a wide diversity of product types and sizes; from individual items such as shoes, winter jackets, baby clothes and accessories to packages and parcels weighing up to 35kg.
Sorting up to 5500 items per hour, this highly versatile tilt tray sorter whisks bagged items, flat packs and small parts through automatic scanning and in-feed, to a multitude of destination chutes at a speed of 0.75 to 1.1 m/sec – making fast sortation productive, accurate and cost-efficient.
TRANSFORMATIONAL PERFORMANCE SDI Group’s Push Tray Unit (PTU) is a sorter designed to transform DC sortation performance, increasing productivity by several hundred per cent compared to a manual process. Its ability to handle a broad array of products from apparel, shoe boxes, small electronic items, packages and parcels makes it a highly versatile solution for eCommerce businesses keen to boost efficiency in the warehouse and win customer favour.
IN CONTROL Of course, sophisticated control software capable of adapting to changing demands, in real-time, is absolutely critical to meeting the expectations of multi-channel retailers and their increasingly demanding customer base. Late as possible cutoffs and fast, accurate picking are essential to retaining customers and winning sales.
SDI Group has invested heavily in developing software capable of preparing single or multiple orders, configuring material for store fulfilment, managing returns, or processing on-line orders on a single sorter. SDI’s V5.0 software maximises the use of the sorter, making it a highly versatile tool for fulfilling a wide diversity of order requirements. Until now, several versions of SCS software existed in parallel and were dedicated to different types of operations, such as distribution to stores or efulfilment.
The V5.0 software makes it possible to run both operations on the same sorter.
The software also allows even greater versatility.
Using a single database a company can define multiple clients and numerous ‘jobs’, allocating destination chutes in either a fixed or dynamic way, depending on requirements. Induction stations can also be assigned in accordance to needs and ‘client profiles’ can be created, stored and deployed with ease – ensuring consistency.
