At Lillian Vernon Corporation's 827,000 square foot distribution center in Virginia Beach, Va., the three keys to success are sortation, sortation, sortation.

That is especially true for handling products that have been personalized, which is a key differentiator for the 53-year-old national catalog and online specialty and gift retailer.

"Traditional distribution is pick, pack and ship," says Prince F. Duke, senior engineering manager at Lillian Vernon Corp. "For us, it's pick, personalize, pack and ship."

Personalization also adds complexity to order fulfillment. Lillian Vernon offers customers 14 different ways to personalize a product. And 40% of the 10 million items shipped from Virginia Beach last year went through some sort of extra process in the 100,000 square foot mezzanine work area for personalized items.

Afterward, many of those items have to be matched up with non-personalized items to complete an order. A series of sorters makes all of that happen and then sorts the assembled orders to the shipping area.

A narrow-belt sorter (Quantum, 201-684-0002) directs totes coming from a mezzanine work area to the right lane where an operator manually stacks totes to a pallet by wave.

Once enough pallets from a wave accumulate, a tilted tray sorter (W&H Systems, 201-933-7840) handling 60 trays per minute sorts individual items to hampers for further picking.

At the end of the picking and packing process, a traditional tilt tray sorter (Eisenmann, 815-455-4100) directs boxes to shipping lanes by shipping method.

Automating these processes has delivered big savings, according to Prince. "In the personalized items department alone, we've seen a 33% reduction in the cost per piece for handling an item," says Prince. "And we've increased our pieces per hour produced in that area by 52%. It's not often you can reduce costs and increase throughput at the same time."

In addition, the sortation systems were part of a larger automation project delivering savings of $600,000 per year.

"Before the sorters, this was a very labor-intensive, manual process," says Duke. As volumes grew, Lillian Vernon needed to automate the processes. "It reached the point where we needed too many people to run the operation and keep up with throughput," Duke adds.

The process begins when totes of personalized products come down from the personalization mezzanine on a belt conveyor. After an overhead scanner reads a bar code, the narrow-belt sorter directs the totes to the right lane where an operator manually stacks totes to a pallet.

Once a pallet is stacked, it's staged by wave in a pallet staging lane on the floor. When a wave is complete, the pallets are transported by pallet jack to an induction area for the tilted tray sorter.

The 20 inch by 24 inch tray is permanently tilted. A lip around three sides of the tray holds parts in place. The operator removes personalized items out of the totes one at a time and places them bar code up in a tray. Then, each item is automatically scanned and verified by an overhead digital camera scanner. The scanner verifies and time-stamps each piece, then identifies it by wave and destination location.

The sorter can sort to 100 locations set up for orderpicking, or to one of five exception lanes for products that can't be read or assigned to an order.

The trays feature a hinged lip that allows the item to drop into a hamper at the right sort location. Each hamper has a spring-loaded bottom that lowers as the hamper fills. That allows for ergonomic loading and unloading.

After a hamper fills with 16 orders, an indicator light notifies the facility that the order is complete and ready to go to an order assembly area.

Personalized items are now picked to a shipping box on a pick cart. That is then wheeled to other areas of the facility to pick non-personalized items. Once all items for an order have been picked, the shipping boxes are inducted onto a tilt tray sorter that sorts boxes to a shipping lane by shipping method.