When retailers' demands exceeded Rocky Shoes & Boots Inc. capacity to pick, pack and ship, the company decided to consolidate four existing facilities into one. But rather than move into one of the existing facilities, the company decided to start fresh with a 191,000 square foot distribution center and a custom-engineered mix of new handling equipment.

"As the leading manufacturer of Gortex footwear in North America, we had simply outgrown our old facilities," Rocky distribution manager Becky Steenrod explains. "Putting the new system in place allowed us to get ahead of the growth and meet our expansion goals."

Equipment includes standard racks, lift trucks, conveyors, sortation, mezzanine and warehouse management software.

The impact of the new system on operations has been dramatic. Labor costs fell by two thirds. Instead of employing three shifts, seven days per week plus overtime, the company now operates one shift, five days per week with no overtime.

In addition, the system flattens peak season expenses by reducing seasonal laborers from 115 to 50. Shifts during the four-month period were decreased from three to two and overtime was eliminated. The regular labor force was also cut back, from 90 to 45 employees.

Customized, inventory-tracking software also yields benefits for the company. Inventory accuracy increased from 88% to 99.7%.

The integrated system features wire-guided orderpickers in a very-narrow-aisle setting. The main storage area has 25 aisles and 87,000 locations.

Orderpicker operators receive picking instructions from the warehouse software by on-board wireless terminals. When picking is completed in an aisle, the items are brought to one end and deposited on a conveyor that wraps around the entire facility. The conveyor carries products to a 20-lane sortation system that soft-drops them into the appropriate packing lane. Another conveyor transports finished packages to the shipping area. Raised sortation lanes with a mezzanine make room for storage, return and shipping areas.

"You don't have to be a $100 million company to get the dramatic benefits from a system like this," Steenrod says. "This system was custom engineered with our budget in mind."