Trade sorted!
June 1st 2006

Logistics systems integrator, SDI Greenstone has installed an automated sortation system at RM Trade's distribution centre in Vacarisses, near Barcelona

Logistics specialists RM Trade handles the distribution of children's clothing and accessories (such as prams) to Prenatal stores in Spain, Portugal and France. The SDI Greenstone sorter at RM Trade's DC is used to assemble orders for a childrenswear chain and to handle returns for a leading Spanish fashion retailer, is believed to be the biggest in Europe.

The previous method of manually assembling individual store orders, one by one, was under great pressure to keep pace with Prenatal's expanding product range - with all the permutations of sizes and colours there are now around 500,000 individual SKUs - and a rapidly-growing number of outlets. The SDI Greenstone flat garment sortation system was installed as part of a programme to introduce automated, largely RF-driven, processes through much of the Vacarisses distribution centre. The objective was to speed-up throughput, give greater flexibility to handle a wider product range, and to shorten the delivery times to stores.

233 drop zones

The SDI Greenstone sorter, installed on the first floor of the distribution centre, comprises a massive 65m-long oblong carousel equipped with 236 'bomb bay' trays. Arranged around each side of the carousel are 233 drop zones with inclined chutes, which are allocated, as required, to individual stores. Garments are transferred from the ground-floor storage area, where batches are picked (using an RF system developed by RM Trade), and manually loaded into the bomb-bay trays at the sorter's induct station. The induct station has three fixed in line scanners that read the barcodes on the garments.

The scanners communicate with the Warehouse Sortation System (WSS), which was developed in-house by RTI, a 100% SDI subsidiary. As the goods pass round the system the WSS sends signals to the sorter's control software to activate solenoids that open the bomb-bay flaps on the trays as they pass over the required drop-stations, so the garments slide out of the sorter into the chutes.

The chutes are specially designed to hold the sorted items until they are ready to be collected by RM Trade staff. When ready, the items are released from the chutes and packed neatly into standard 400x600mm 'store boxes', ready positioned at the drop stations. Each of the boxes has been given a barcode, and there is also a barcode on each drop station. When the store boxes are full the operatives scan both barcodes to reconcile the store box with its exact contents as processed through the sorter.

The boxes also include printed delivery notes itemising the contents.

The boxes are then pushed through to conveyors, two of which run down the inside of the sorter carousel. These two conveyors take the boxes to a further single conveyor, running at right angles to the end of the sorter, for transfer to the despatch bays on the ground floor where the boxes are sealed and given delivery labels (which are generated by printers linked into RM Trade's Warehouse Management System).

SDI Greenstone has also installed a rope conveyor to carry empty store boxes up to the sorter from the ground floor, and position them alongside the chutes at the drop stations.

With its pick-to-light process RM Trade is currently batch-picking up to 15,000 individual items per day. The SDI Greenstone sortation system has the capacity handle more than 7,000 items per hour, sorting into around 200 store boxes; each order can comprise as many as 60 different SKUs. RM Trade's warehouse manager Raphael Manzanares says: "Volumes like this would simply not have been possible with our old manual sortation procedures. As well as increased sortation speed and capacity, the SDI Greenstone system also gives us much greater flexibility in handling orders of all sizes and, with the continuous batch-pickto- sorter process we are now operating we can cut down the time between receiving orders and delivering to store."

Returns processing

The huge capacity of the SDI Greenstone sorter is also enabling RM Trade to extend the service offered to its clients; a leading Spanish female clothing retailer is now using the company to process all of its returns. The system receives mixed batches of returned garments and sorts them by product, delivered to the drop stations in the same way as the Prenatal operation.

This returns operation is currently sorting around 32,000 items per day - but it has the capacity to handle up to 80,000.

"Such capacity will enable us to grow our operations well into the future,"says Raphael Manzanares.

RM Trade is in the process of streamlining operation at Vacarisses even further, with the current racked 'bulk' storage areas, served by reach trucks, soon to be replaced by an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS).

More articles from SDI Group UK Limited: