Flexibility for fashion
December 1st 2004

A high throughput automated sortation and storage system from SDI Greenstone is providing flexibility and extra capacity at Matalan’s new southern distribution centre

SDI Greenstone has installed a highthroughput automated storage and sortation system at Matalan’s new 32,000m2 southern distribution centre (DC) in Corby.

With a turnover in excess of £1 billion Matalan is the UK’s biggest volume retailer.

The new DC has been established to provide the company with the extra capacity it needs to support its growing number of stores in the south of the country. Designed and operated by Wincanton, the facility will store both hanging and boxed goods, and marks the company’s first use of a boxed-item sortation system.

SDI Greenstone won the contract to design, build and project-manage the new installation on the strength of its deep understanding of fashion logistics, the highly pragmatic nature of the solutions proposed, and the excellent track record of the systems it has already installed in Matalan’s Skelmersdale DC.

Tight deadlines

Completed to meet tight deadlines, the 25,500m2 low bay warehouse installation, comprises separate systems for hanging garments and boxed items. The hanging garment system has the capacity to handle almost 1.2 million items. Eight receiving bays serve the hanging garment system, the core of which is a three tier Goods on Hangers (GOH) zone. Sets of garments arriving from suppliers on hangers are unloaded onto height-adjustable telescopic booms at the eight receiving bays and placed onto 100mm barcoded plastic trolleys.

Two pin-chain powered conveyors take the trolleys up to a pre-sort area on the mezzanine floor where there are three lanes, each capable of handling 1500 trolley sets per hour. At this point the individual garments are matched, via manual barcode scanning, to the trolleys carrying them.

The trolleys then pass through the first of two barcode reading pre-sorters and are directed via PC to one of three further hang sorters, one on each of the three GOH tiers, for either storage or cross docking. The ground floor sorter has 332 static lanes holding 81,500 trolley sets, the first floor has 338 lanes holding 80,730 sets and the second floor has 204 lanes holding 55,080 sets. All locations are barcoded, and picking is driven by RF commands relayed to hand held scanners.

SDI Greenstone’s boxed item system occupies around 50% of the low bay warehouse, served by six goods-in bays. Two open onto the yard for unloading palletised deliveries and four are equipped with 12m telescopic belt booms.

Every pallet is given a barcoded LPN label and the WMS then routes the goods to one of three locations. Slow-moving items and long term bulk stock go to a high bay store, served by three automatic storage and retrieval (AS/RS) cranes, in an adjacent warehouse. Moderately fast-moving stock is sent to a narrow aisle racking zone. Fastmoving stock, which is already allocated to specific stores, is transferred to two three-tier picking towers for cross docking.

There are two dedicated lines, one from each pick tower, which merge with a recirculation loop into one line. As items are inducted onto the sorter loop the barcodes are read and the items discharged as required onto 40 output ‘store chutes’. The sorter also has a post-sort scanner to identify items whose barcodes have been misscanned, or for which there is no matching data in the WMS. These items are diverted onto a reject spur for rectification.

Each of the store chutes has declined powered belts and gravity rollers to take goods to the despatch bays. Here operatives load the items into roll cages, scanning each carton to confirm picking to the WMS.

Control software

The control software for both the boxed goods and hanging garment storage and sortation systems was specially written by SDI Greenstone’s sister company RTI.

The high-bay AS/RS storage facility with its two aisle changing cranes, was already in place when Matalan took over the Corby warehouse, having been left behind by the previous occupant. SDI Greenstone has reengineered this facility, recommending a third fixed-path crane and changes to the pallet handling system to double its capacity.

David James, Matalan’s head of supply chain development, says: ‘The contract was awarded to SDI Greenstone partly on the strength of the hanging garment system the company has designed for our Skelmersdale DC, which has been performing admirably – to the extent of winning the Institute of Logistics & Transport’s Materials Handling Award.

‘The solution that SDI Greenstone proposed for this was pragmatically simple, flexible and practical with no unnecessary ‘bells and whistles’. It looked right on paper, and it works well in practice.’ The DC will start operating in volume in February, ramping up to full throughput by the middle of 2005.

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