The design engineers at Lands' End had a tall order to fill. They needed to create more throughput and flexibility in their sortation and packing systems. The goal was to double throughput in a system occupying half of the footprint and with half of the labor.

"What we saw in our future was a need for increased capacity," recalls Dan Whitnable, engineering manager. "We needed to be able to pack more orders, but were constrained by people and somewhat on the space."

The solution was a new crossbelt sorting system that provides speed and high accuracy. This sorter replaced an aging tilt tray unit.

The old sorter and packing system could perform 60 orders an hour per packer. The new system can do 180–200 orders per hour per packer, or triple the previous total. These gains were achieved because of the way the picking, sorting and packing areas now interact.

In the past, batch picks were limited to the number of sort chutes available on the tilt tray system. The only way to increase capacity would have been to add chutes, which was not possible with tight quarters. About 20 orders were sorted to each chute, which were then sorted by hand and packed. The old sorter also required 30-inch centers for the trays to have enough time and distance to properly slide the product into the destination chutes. This also took up badly needed floor space.

With the new system, items are batch picked to cover 2–3,000 orders at a time. This means fewer trips are made to the pick faces, saving time and labor. Once pulled, the batches are conveyed to the sorter where they pass through an initial sort that divides them into three primary subsystems, each with 128 chutes. Products for 20 or 30 orders are gathered into each chute based on 15-inch centers – half of the space required by the previous sorting system.

Once items have been fully accumulated in a chute within the subsystem, a gate opens and the products are conveyed and re-inducted back into the sorter for a second pass that replaces the hand sorting performed with the old system. On this second sort, items are diverted to only 44 secondary chutes based on 30-inch centers. The wider chutes for the secondary sort assure nearly 100% accuracy. Accumulated products are then released to a conveyor that transports them to one of 15 pack stations.

The new sorter was erected closer to the order filling areas, rather than near packing. This created space for new carton erectors.

• Crossbelt sorter:
  Beumer Corp., 732-560-1188, www.beumercorp.com