Instead of having associates crawling over one another to manually pick hats to be shipped to Hat World's stores, product comes to them through a conveyor system and six horizontal carousel pods.

Tony Defrench, senior director of distribution, says the quality of orders shipped to Hat World's stores has improved, helped in part by a put-to-light system. However, the real benefit for the company has been labor savings. “We have more than tripled our throughput and reduced our overall head count,” he says. “Being able to accommodate growth, improve our service levels and reduce our head count is hard to beat.”

Hat World's distribution processes begin at the dock in receiving. To receive inventory into the warehouse management system (WMS), every case is opened, hats are identified by stock keeping unit (SKU) and quantities are entered into the WMS. A case typically contains 144 hats. At that point, the merchandise is ready for directed putaway.

Product that is going to stay in the facility as back stock will be directed to a pallet rack storage location. Merchandise may be palletized, stored in custom-built containers that hold 72 individual hats, or stored as eaches on the shelves.

Operators are directed by the WMS to a specific aisle for putaway in storage. Once they verify the putaway by scanning a license plate bar code associated with the product along with a location tag, the merchandise is available for an order.

Fast-moving SKUs or new releases will be palletized with other fast-moving items and crossdocked to one of six pre-distribution areas where they will be inducted into the automated system. Typically, these SKUs will be received, sorted to store locations and delivered to the shipping dock in one day.

Associates, working off a pick sheet generated by the WMS, zone pick the SKUs. Once all items in a zone have been picked, they are delivered to one of six pre-distribution stations. These are the same stations where crossdocked material was delivered from the receiving dock.

At these stations, associates scan a license plate bar code on a pallet or case followed by the SKU on a hat. The system indicates how many hats to place in a tote that will be delivered to one of the carousel pods. Once all the hats have been placed in a tote, the associate scans the license plate on that tote and releases the tote on a touch screen. The tote is then automatically delivered by the conveyor sorter to the correct carousel pods to be sorted to the assigned stores. There are six identical carousel pods. Each pod holds 128 store positions.

When a tote arrives in the carousel area, an associate scans it into a location (typically, an associate will have eight totes at a time in a pod). While SKUs are being picked from one tote into a store location, the adjacent carousel is spinning to retrieve the next store location, increasing productivity.

Lights above the totes tell the associate how many hats to grab from that tote while lights at the carousels will tell him where to place the hats. Once an associate has put the hats to a shipping container, he hits a task-complete button to finish that put.

When a tote is emptied, it is placed on an outbound lane that delivers it back to the pre-distribution area. The next tote to be processed is scanned into a location at the pod.

The associate manually decides when a shipping container is full, based on the size of the hats going into the shipping container, and hits a carton-full button. He places the shipping container on the same outbound conveyor lane as the empty tote. Then an empty shipping container is scanned into that slot.

Full containers are delivered to the shipping lane. There, the system generates a shipping label, it's automatically taped and put on a truck for delivery to a store.