Sortation enables value-added personalization of products

At Lillian Vernon, sortation routes personalized products through the distribution center.

By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 9/5/2007

For Lillian Vernon Corporation at its 827,000 square foot distribution center in Virginia Beach, Va., the three keys to success are sortation, sortation, sortation.

“Traditional distribution is pick, pack and ship,” says Prince F. Duke, senior engineering manager at Lillian Vernon, the 53-year-old national catalog and online specialty and gift retailer. “For us, it’s pick, personalize, pack and ship. Personalization is what makes us different from the competition.”

Adding a personal touch 
Personalization is one of the value-added services that differentiates Lillian Vernon from the competition. It also adds complexity to its fulfillment operations. While many companies engrave and embroider products, Lillian Vernon offers customers 14 different ways to personalize a product, everything from engraving to embroidery to sand blasting to heat pressing.

In fact, 40% of the 10 million items shipped from Virginia Beach last year went through some sort of extra process in a 100,000 square foot mezzanine work area. Afterwards, many of those items have to be matched up with non-personalized items to complete an order.

How order fulfillment works 
The catalog retailer relies on a series of sorters to enable the value-added services and then sort the assembled orders to the shipping area.

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 a tilted tray sorter.

The 20 inch by 24 inch tray is permanently tilted. The operator removes personalized items out of the totes and places them bar code up in a tray. Then, each item is scanned and verified by an overhead digital camera scanner. The scanner verifies and time-stamps each piece; and identifies it by wave and destination location.

The sorter can sort to 100 locations set up for order picking, 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. 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 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.

Reducing the cost of handling
Automating these processes has delivered big savings, according to Prince. “In the personalized items department, 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.”