Smart sorting drives new business
State-of-the-art sortation system opens the door to third party logistics opportunity.
By DAVID MALONEY -- Modern Materials Handling, 11/1/1999
What do a graphics printing company and a third-party provider of parcel services have in common? Not much normally. But for Quad Graphics and its subsidiary Parcel Direct, one distribution center with a highly automated sortation system has brought the two together to save costs and eliminate steps in the supply chain.Quad Graphics is one of the nation's largest printing companies and one of the biggest users of the United States Postal Service. It mails millions of magazines, catalogs, and newspaper inserts each year to hundreds of thousands of individual addresses.
Parcel Direct is the distribution and transportation arm for Quad Graphics' printed materials and for other outside companies, acting as their third-party logistics (3PL) provider. By sorting and transporting materials from its clients as well as for Quad Graphics, Parcel Direct provides huge postage savings for both.
The center for all the action is a distribution center adjacent to a Quad Graphics printing plant in Martinsburg, W.V.
While printed materials from the plant are cross-docked by Parcel Direct, the facility also sorts for its 3PL clients between 15,000 and 30,000 parcels a day on a tilt-tray sortation system (Crisplant). The average parcel is through the facility in about 12 hours with a better than 99% sorting accuracy. The sortation system is sized to handle ten times current volumes.
"Our ability to mix another type of freight, such as parcels, with our printed material is just a perfect marriage," says operations manager Don Terkel. "It is a natural fit between two product lines."
While many of today's package carriers, such as Fed Ex and United Parcel Service, have their own fleet of trucks for delivery to individual addresses, Parcel Direct chooses to rely on the existing infrastructure of the USPS.
What Parcel Direct does is remove several steps that most parcels undergo when they enter the system at a local post office. Typically, the post office must send these parcels to a regional bulk mail center (BMC) where they are sorted for delivery to various parts of the country. These are then trucked to other BMCs and substations for further sorting to the local post offices that will deliver them.
Sophisticated sortation
Substantial savings are gained by Parcel Direct because it performs its own sorting. It also uses its own fleet of trucks to directly deliver combined loads of printed materials and client parcels to postal facilities nationwide. By combining the two streams of products into the same shipment, fuller truckloads are created and sent deeper into the postal system than either could attain individually.
Each product line is handled separately and is not combined until they are loaded onto the trucks.
Printed materials arrive from the nearby Quad Graphics printing plant in pallet loads.
Each catalog or magazine is pre-routed and stamped with proper postage to its eventual destination. These of course do not require sorting, as they are already sequenced when their address labels are applied - all the way down to a mail carrier's delivery route.
As a result, printed materials are generally cross-docked. After being delivered by truck, they are taken immediately by forklift to a staging area in shipping according to destination until the outgoing truck arrives to take them to a bulk mail center or other postal facility.
Meanwhile, parcels from 3PL clients are trucked to the Martinsburg facility directly from the client's own distribution centers. Many of Parcel Direct's customers are companies that are already print clients of Quad Graphics, such as Lillian Vernon and Hanover Direct.
As truckloads arrive, belt driven induction conveyors extend 48 feet into the back of the receiving trailers. Each receiving door is linked by the warehouse management system (WMS) to the parcels that will be inducted. As the parcels are received, each is sent through a cubing and weighing system. A scanner reads a bar code identification number and zip code destination while the package is also weighed and measured. The WMS stores this information for use in determining the parcel's proper sort destination. The system also has the ability to electronically receive the shipping manifest, which can automatically be reconciled during the induction.
Packages are then manually inducted into a primary sorter. There are several possible destinations for these. Parcels with the identical first three digits in their zip codes can be grouped for delivery to individual BMCs around the country. These are assigned to 21 large drive-out shipping bins located on the docks. As parcels drop into the drive-outs, they are linked to that BMC destination by the WMS and added to that truck's manifest. They can then be loaded for immediate transport.
Additional savings can be gained through by-passing the BMCs with finer sorting to the same five-digit zip codes. These parcels are diverted to accumulation bins that will later feed the secondary sorter.
Deeper into the USPS
The secondary sorter consists of 900 trays and 520 chutes. Sorting here is done by waves. These are timed to match the schedule of trucks departing for each destination. Most of the chutes will be assigned to specific substations of the BMCs, known as sectional center facilities (SCFs), and direct delivery units (DDUs), which is the designation for local post offices.
It is all a matter of designating the most cost-effective destination.
"Anywhere you want that package to go you can put it," says Rick Nielson, operations supervisor.
Parcels are inducted into the secondary sorter from the accumulation bins. Each package is again scanned as it is placed on a tilt tray. The system then determines the appropriate bin to drop the parcel.
Most waves usually sort to about 250 chutes. This concentrates the workers into a smaller part of the facility and permits the bins from the previous sort to be emptied. The system is designed to be very flexible in its chute selection. Up to six chutes can be assigned to any postal destination, and this number can be changed as the system determines that bins are full.
Once all parcels have reached a particular chute, a light comes on indicating the parcels can be removed from the chute and loaded onto pallets. Each pallet is assigned a license plate that is scanned along with the chute ID using a hand scanner. A forklift driver picks up the load, scans it again, takes it to be wrapped, and then transports it to one of the 33 shipping docks. Each pallet is labeled with a postal flag that displays its destination and barcode. The barcode is scanned each time the pallet is moved.
About 50% of the time a load is placed immediately onto a truck along with printed materials for that location. Remaining loads are staged until a truck is ready.
Another benefit of the system has been a reduction in labor costs.
"Automation of the system let us control our labor and how we run our crews," says Nielson. "We need a lot less people to do what we do than other places."
The result has been accurate sorting of parcels, 95% of which reach their mail destinations on time.
"Consistency and the ability to be predictable is important," adds Terkel. "We have an advantage because of the automation. That is why we are very efficient."
SYSTEM SNAPSHOT
Parcel Direct
Martinsburg, WV
FACILITY SIZE 387,000 sq. ft.
KEY PERSONNEL Don Terkel, operations manager; Rick Nielson, operations supervisor
PRODUCTS HANDLED 15,000-30,000 parcels flowthrough daily with a potential of 300,000 sorts per 20 hour period
ACCURACY +99%
SORTATION SYSTEMS Crisplant 800-805-0560
>CONVEYORS Automotion 708-229-3700
SCANNERS CiMatrix 800-646-6664
LIFT TRUCKS Toyota 800-226-0009
WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM Intermec (Norand) 800-347-2636
STRETCHWRAPPERS Lantech 502-267-4200
Benefits at a glance:
- Able to combine print and parcels in the same shipment
- Penetration of postal system for freight savings
- Reduced labor costs
- Consistency and predictability of delivery
- Electronic manifest generation
- Flexible system
Talkback
Related Content
Related Content
Sponsored Links
View All Blogs
