Corporate Express: Customer service reigns
Near perfect order accuracy, lower costs, higher throughput, and extended order placement hours are the hallmarks of this DC consolidation.
By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 2/1/2004
With just four major players in the office supplies business, the competition to satisfy customer needs is intense.
"Doing distribution flawlessly is very important to us," says Tim Beauchamp, senior vice president of distribution operations at Corporate Express.
And that premise is exactly what made the new Corporate Express distribution center in Secaucus, N.J. the Modern Materials HandlingProductivity Achievement Award winner in distribution.
Today, order processing accuracy exceeds 99.9%, a considerable improvement over paper-based systems previously used by the company. Costs have also been reduced, especially labor, even though throughputs are higher. The facility picks 20,000 lines a day, filling 15,000 cartons.
Furthermore, such increased efficiencies have allowed Corporate Express to extend the cut-off time for next-day deliveries from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.—a big boost to customer service.
Central to this success is broad use of automated materials handling and advanced information systems. There are 3.6 miles of conveyor, a sliding shoe sorter, a customized warehouse management system (WMS), and wrist scanners coupled with voice-directed split-case picking.
Planning for the future
The new building, located across the Hudson River from New York City, is the consolidation of three DCs that once served the metropolitan area. The consolidation, says Beauchamp, was an important step in merging Corporate Express operations with those of its new parent company, Netherlands-based Buhrmann NV.
"We first got our corporate, regional and division teams together to come up with a distribution philosophy and determine a materials handling methodology," continues Beauchamp. "Once that was decided then we designed the building around it. The design is very custom to our operations."
Beauchamp estimates that by designing the building to the company's specific needs, the team was able to get 8–10% additional storage in the facility compared to a spec building it might have bought. And with 20,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) on hand and given building costs in Northern New Jersey, every square foot counts.
Another unique feature of the building is the design of the receiving area. The same doors used for incoming products can also be used for shipping.
"The receiving area would have sat unused during the night," Beauchamp explains, "so we thought, 'How can we use it?'"
The solution was to install conveyor spurs connected to a pop-up sorter further back in the building. Those spurs deliver product directly from the sorter to over-the-road trailers when shipping is at a peak and those additional 12 dock doors are needed. When the area is used for receiving during the day, the spurs are raised above the floor using hoists. This clears the floor and allows lift trucks and pallet jacks to offload pallets from the trailers.
Filling customer orders
All inventory received in Secaucus is either bar coded by suppliers or bar coded on arrival. From that point on, the WMS directs activities in the facility. Most full pallet loads are putaway in racks or bulk floor storage by lift trucks. Less-than-pallet-load SKUs are collected onto a pallet at the dock and taken to very-narrow-aisle (VNA) storage for putaway by orderpicker trucks. Those items needed to fill orders immediately are sent directly to the forward pick module.
Picking is performed in all areas of the facility. Printed labels guide pallet and full-case picking in pallet and VNA rack as well as bulk floor storage and the forward pick module. Picked items are brought by lift truck to a conveyor that feeds the sorter prior to shipment.
However, about 80% of orders require less than full-case picks. Split-case items are in multi-level modules of carton flow rack and shelving. Voice-directed picking makes item selection highly efficient.
The WMS plans each carton needed to fill an order. Cartons are erected in three sizes, bar code labeled, assigned to an order, and conveyed to the first of 32 possible pick zones.
Workers wearing voice-based headsets are directed by the WMS what to pick from flow rack and shelving, the number of items, and which carton to fill. After collecting the specified number of items from a location, the worker scans the location with a wrist scanner, verifying the pick.
The system also tells the worker when the picks for a carton have been completed in a particular zone. The carton is then pushed off to the conveyor for delivery to the next zone. A typical order contains four lines with an average of 1.2 items per line.
"The pick-to-voice has been knocking us out with how accurate it is," says Beauchamp. "We can take people off the street and easily train them. It has changed our whole mindset on distribution."
A sliding shoe sorter with 45 diverts feeds full cases and item cartons to 38 shipping doors. Automatic extenders assist in loading the 72 panel trucks used for deliveries.
"You can never have enough dock doors," says Beauchamp, "so we designed each dock for two turns and we also custom-designed the doors to fit the trucks." When shipments are especially heavy, the receiving area is pressed into service for shipments too.
The Secaucus facility is having an impact on Corporate Express well beyond the metropolitan New York area. New facilities in Baltimore and Idaho Falls are based on what was learned in New Jersey. In addition, voice-directed picking is being rolled out to 22 other Corporate Express DCs.
In any case, this facility is projected to meet the company's needs for the next seven years. "Our volumes will increase and we will not have any problems meeting our delivery times," says Beauchamp.
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