Month: September 2019

Ocado Retail, the new joint venture between Ocado Group and M&S, is to establish a new 304,355 sq ft facility at SEGRO Logistics Park Purfleet, which it says will create up to 1,500 local jobs and help meet demand from its increasing customer base to the East of London.

Ocado’s fifth Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC) will sit on the entire 19-acre site, which is located inside the M25 alongside the A13. This will enable quick and easy access to the orbital motorway and the wider strategic road network, as well as providing an artery directly into the large London market, enabling the company to offer a better service for online shoppers in the area.

The unit at SEGRO Logistics Park Purfleet will combine the space, power and connectivity to house Ocado’s cutting-edge, robotic packing operation, along with a BREEAM Excellent sustainability rating. Work is due to begin on site later this month.
Ocado employs a hub and spoke operating model, where Customer Fulfilment Centres are the hubs from where customer orders are fulfilled, and local spokes are from where the majority of customer orders are delivered. SEGRO Logistics Park Purfleet is the second Ocado facility in SEGRO’s portfolio, joining the 68,000 sq ft spoke at the Origin development in Park Royal.

Sorting specialist Böwe Systec has announced its plans for next month’s Parcel+Post Expo in Amsterdam.

The rapid growth in the volume of items and the demand for ever shorter delivery times make it imperative to optimize processes. Smart sorting automation is an integrated concept from Böwe Systec that consists of a suite of solutions that do just that. As a one stop shop the automation specialist covers the entire post and parcel logistics chain and Böwe Systec customers receive a complete, all-embracing package from a single source.

With its OptiSorter, which can be installed as a horizontal or vertical variant depending upon the space available, Böwe Systec is showing an ideal, intuitively operated solution that delivers total flexibility and maximum performance. Handling up to 18,000 items per hour, the OptiSorter can cope with pretty much anything from banana boxes to lipsticks and even business cards. It can even handle the kinds of items that are often sent from Asia – very small and light, sometimes irregularly shaped and often wrapped in plastic film or sealed with adhesive tape. This is because of its unique Push-Tray technology, which ensures a gentle and, above all, reliable sorting process that comes into its own precisely where other systems hit their limits.

Another of the show highlights is the launch of the Double Split-Tray sorter. This has been specifically designed for sorting light items weighing up to 5 kilograms. Also known as a Bomb-Bay sorter, it comes into its own in areas such as e-commerce, omni-channel, retail fulfilment, post or pharmaceuticals. Its specially shaped trays mean that besides the usual standards it can also sort products such as clothing, books, pharmaceuticals, polybags, multimedia and flat items or jewellery. Irregularly shaped or round items can also be handled without any problem. Both sides of the tray open simultaneously and the item falls flat and directly into the sorting destination. Its major advantage is that the Double Split-Tray sorter is fitted with two compartments per tray, which doubles its capacity and shortens processing times.

For post and mixed mail sorting there is the Simex family, consisting of the Simex Letter and the Simex Flexi sorting systems. The Simex Flexi is able, for example, to sort small C6 postcards just as reliably as large B4 format letters up to 20 mm thick. Magazines, newspapers, catalogs or polywrapped items can all be processed by the system – at high speeds of up to 30,000 items per hour.

Both, OptiSorter and Simex systems, are controlled by the fully integrated Böwe Sort software. The consistent design of the software across all Böwe Systec systems and its intuitive operation lay the foundation for considerable productivity increases. Sorting schemes can be prepared in no time at all and processes are monitored from start to finish. Additional features such as automated returns processing or walk sorting further improve the sorting processes.

Anyone looking for competitive software platforms for intralogistics is looking in the right place by coming to Böwe Systec. Innovative Auto-ID systems including Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Warehouse Control Systems (WCS), and serialization solutions also form part of the product range of this automation specialist. With RFID there is nothing standing in the way of the one hundred percent tracking of goods in real time. All of which makes Böwe Systec the first port of call for integrated intralogistics solutions.

Make a success of your growth by visiting Böwe Systec on booth 1030 in Hall 8 at Parcel+Post Expo in Amsterdam from October 1 to 3 2019.

A new warehouse installation is proving a big leap in distribution efficiency for the Australian operation of Toll Group’s big-name toys and games customer. Toll perform all the Australian warehousing and distribution for a leading global toy manufacturer based out of a 36,000 square metre multi-customer site in Sydney. Almost half the facility is now dedicated to the customer’s products, distributed to major retailers and independent toy stores throughout the country.

To achieve the efficiency and requirements of a major client, Toll looked to put sortation in place to better manage the picking process with speed and accuracy. Through a competitive process, logistics specialist Swisslog was chosen as the solution delivered more flexibility and opportunities to deliver other benefits in the future as well as an expected 200% productivity improvement.

The new solution completely changed the baseline manual warehouse operation; enabling Toll to provide higher distribution volumes of retail ready cartons, picked for each store in less time, with more efficiency and using less space. Moving to wave picking techniques, cartons in a wide variety of shapes and sizes are fed to an automated sortation system that handles up to 20 customer orders at a time and 95% of the product range.

The entire system is managed by Swisslog’s SynQ software. This takes customer orders from Toll’s system and coordinates all the equipment and controls of the automated operation, delivering efficiency, speed and accuracy. As pallets of product are delivered by forklift to each of two infeed stations, staff manually depalletise cartons and place them on conveyor, where they are automatically scanned and labelled at high speed (approximately one every two seconds).

Travelling along conveyor, cartons are then merged onto an Activated Roller Belt (ARB) sorter. The system was designed around the ARB sorter as the requirement is for up to 4,000 cartons per hour, the sweet spot for this type of system. It takes up far less space, and has a much lower cost, than large scale cross belt, sliding shoe or tilt tray sorters. The mechanics of the sorter also means gentle handling even at high speed.

The entire sortation system is just 36m long, fitting easily into the existing warehouse. The sorter feeds cartons onto one of 20 dispatch lane conveyors, which are gravity braked to continue the gentle handling operation. Swisslog’s SynQ control system spreads the load as evenly as possible across dispatch lanes, to ensure that lanes are not full while others are awaiting products. SynQ can also direct a carton around the sortation loop if the required dispatch lane is full.

“Our initial start-up has shown that the system is achieving even better productivity than anticipated,” says Toll’s Dean Boulter. “Getting through the picking wave faster means we can start the afternoon shift later, giving customers a later cut off time for orders.”

The project had to be delivered in an existing warehouse, which involved isolating the sorter area while it was installed and commissioned. Despite this restriction, the project delivery was well managed. The sortation system will also be used for other customers, where relevant, delivering productivity across the warehouse. Toll Group is anticipating getting more out of the system, working with Swisslog as a long-term partner to make refinements that will bring additional benefits to the operation and add further functionality.