Power behind the profits
March 1st 2010 The unseen force behind the record Christmas performance of John Lewis was a £45
million national distribution centre which opened in June
The recent record Christmas sales achieved by John Lewis
has been well reported but less widely known is that this
performance was powered in part by a £45 million
national distribution centre designed and installed by Knapp. The
650,000 sq ft NDC located at Magna Park,Milton Keynes, at
junction 13 of the M1 features 8.4km of conveyors.
John Lewis senior project manager, John Munnelly says: "We
are pleased that our new NDC has been able to help support the
John Lewis businesses in achieving these excellent trading results.
Handling just over two million units at peak was a real
achievement, especially as it has only been operational for six
months."
John Lewis committed to investing in the facility back in 2006
and commissioned Knapp UK to design and install the site's
highly automated internal logistics.
The £25 million automated handling system drives the
distribution for some 87,000 products and contains over a quarter
of a million bin storage locations. It also includes 13 ASRS cranes,
each running in aisles 78m long by 15m high and handling
slower-moving products in totes that are stored double deep. The
Order Storage and Retrieval (OSR) system stores faster-moving
lines in 21,000 totes. Both the ASRS and the OSR feed totes to 33
order picking stations where pick-to-light and put-to-light
technology can achieve up to 1,000 picks per man-hour.
Craig Rollason, head of sales & marketing for Knapp UK, says:
"A major challenge was the fact that we needed to provide storefriendly
deliveries, despite the fact that every John Lewis
department store is laid out differently."
Store layout even including which product lines belong in
which department has always been the preserve of the md
within each John Lewis branch. This fact gave the project an
added dimension of complexity, as did the need to
accommodate the differing distribution needs of the retail
stores and johnlewis.com
under one roof. More articles from KNAPP UK Ltd: | 
