Among the hard lessons learned by e-commerce survivors is that it takes more than a flashy Web site to thrive. Success also depends upon a good business plan, promotion, focused customer service, and an efficient distribution system. It also helps to be connected with a recognized and trusted name.

When acclaimed designer Ralph Lauren decided to launch his Polo brand into cyberspace, he sought partners that understood the needs of dot coms and other forms of electronic commerce.

Ralph Lauren Media was created in February of 2000 as a partnership between Ralph Lauren, The National Broadcasting Company (NBC), NBC Internet (NBCi.com), and ValueVision Fulfillment Services. Basically, Ralph Lauren supplies the product and name recognition, NBC provides promotion on its networks and the Internet, and ValueVision handles distribution and customer service. Their first electronic venture together is Polo.com.

Minnesota-based ValueVision is no stranger to electronic commerce. The company produces television infomercials and additionally owns a home shopping television network. It is also well-versed in fulfillment, distributing products for the network and providing third-party fulfillment services.

ValueVision chose to overhaul a facility it owns in Bowling Green, Ky. to handle the distribution for Ralph Lauren Media. Designed for retail fulfillment with a large amount of pallet rack storage, the facility had not been used in recent years as it was not suited to the direct-to-consumer fulfillment of ValueVision's tv channel.

Ralph Lauren Media targeted the launch of Polo.com for last year's holiday shopping season, easily the biggest sales period for online merchants. After a fast track overhaul, the first products were shipped in November.

"We went from birth to fulfillment in 9 months," says Dan Edmonson, fulfillment center director. "That's pretty impressive."

Also impressive was a design that produced a state of the art DC with a great deal of flexibility (Hy-Tek Material Handling, www.hy-tek.net ).

"We wanted this facility to be very versatile so that it could serve different types of clients," says Howard Fox, senior vice president of operations for ValueVision.

Creating this versatility are 1.25 miles of conveyor (Hytrol Conveyor Co., www.hytrol.com ), a tilt tray sorter that serves both order accumulation and sort-to-shipping duties, an efficient pick module, and a packaging design that emphasizes customer care above all.

"This isn't just a normal pick-pack operation," explains Fox. "Ralph Lauren takes a lot of pride in its packaging. It's part of their imaging and branding."

The DC distributes a wide range of products, including clothing for men, women, and children, as well as Ralph Lauren's home collection, featuring linens, bedding, picture frames, crystal, and other household décor items.

Advance ship notices precede the arrival of merchandise at the facility's eight inbound docks. Two movable extenders serve five of the doors to aid in unloading incoming freight. Another dock has its own dedicated extender, while the two remaining doors handle receipt of non-conveyable products.

Lift trucks take pallet loads of the non-conveyables to a dedicated storage area featuring decked racks. Watches, expensive perfumes, and other valuable items are also taken to a security cage.

The vast majority of products, however, are unloaded using the extenders and transported by conveyor to an upper-level mezzanine. Here, a fixed scanner reads the carton's bar code, prompting the conveyor's pop-up wheels to direct products to one of three destinations.

The first area is quality assurance. About 5% of every incoming order is sent here for random inspection. These items will later head to reserve stock storage or to a pick face in the pick module, the other two destinations for received items.

Also diverted to the quality assurance area are cartons containing more than one stock keeping unit (SKU). Items are removed from these boxes and repacked into single-SKU cartons.

Unbagged items, such as jeans, hats, ties, and towels, are also placed into plastic bags in the Q & A area so they will be protected and not slide off of the tilt trays used later in order sortation.

The second potential destination from the mezzanine is reserve stock storage. Full cases of products are diverted to pick up stations where order pickers gather them for putaway. Each driver selects the storage location where he wants to place the item, drives to that pallet rack, and scans the case bar code label with a hand scanner as well as the location bar code attached to the rack. This informs the warehouse management system (WMS) of the choice of destination. Some 72,000 cartons can be stored in this narrow-aisle area.

The third potential destination is the pick module for SKUs that require immediate replenishment. Upon arrival, a stock worker at the module scans the cartons using a wrist scanner to determine the proper flow rack for placement of the SKU as directed by the WMS.

Orders are received twice daily, upon which the WMS begins building waves for fulfillment and directs replenishment from the reserve stock to the pick module.

The WMS transmits information on SKUs required for replenishment to terminals onboard the orderpicker trucks. The WMS organizes picks so that all SKUs from a specific aisle can be pulled sequentially.

Order pickers also replenish a reserve pick area that handles slower moving SKUs. This rack area contains eight wire-decked levels with a total of 9,984 locations. Products are scanned as they are deposited along with a location bar code to inform the WMS of putaway.

Fulfillment takes place in six waves interspersed throughout the one-shift workday. Typically there are four morning waves and two in the afternoon.

The process begins with the WMS creating pick tickets for each of the eight pick zones, four on each level. The reserve pick racks comprise another two zones, while the non-conveyables are managed in one zone.

The tickets display the quantity and SKUs to be pulled for each customer in that wave. Each SKU has only one active location in the module. The worker reads the desired SKU from the ticket, pulls each item from its location, places a label onto the back of the item, and puts it in a tote.

Once a tote is filled, the worker pushes it off onto a powered takeaway conveyor that weaves through all eight zones of the two-level module. The worker then pulls another empty tote and begins filling it until all SKUs have been picked for the wave.

Meanwhile, individual items from the reserve pick racks are also pulled by order pickers using similar pick tickets and sequential picking. The items are placed into totes and taken directly to the nearby looping end of the pick module's takeaway conveyor. Once deposited onto the conveyor, they follow the same paths as the pick module totes.

The totes next head to an overhead accumulation area adjacent to the tilt tray sorter. They are gathered here until all SKUs in the wave have arrived, then are released to the four induction stations of the sorter. A worker manually pulls each item from the tote and places it onto one of the 275 sorter trays passing by the station.

A scanner reads the bar code label on each unit immediately after induction and determines into which of the 252 chutes to drop the item. Chutes are double-stacked and designed to accumulate multiple orders.

At the end of the chutes are 42 pack stations that serve six chutes each. Invoices, which also contain shipping and return labels, are brought from a central printer to each of the pack stations. The worker reads the invoice to determine which items to pack for that order, using twelve possible carton sizes. Paper dunnage is added if needed. The carton is sealed and the shipping label is placed on the exterior. The average order contains 1.6 items.

Non conveyable items, such as hanging clothing, glassware, and fragile products, are placed onto roller racks and wheeled to the pack stations for processing.

Many customers additionally choose to have their orders packaged in gift boxes. About 50% of customers during the 2000 holiday season selected this special handling service, for which Polo.com currently offers at no additional charge. Several sorter chutes are set aside to gather these orders, which are placed into totes and then conveyed to ten nearby special handling pack stations.

Items are pulled from the totes as directed by the invoice/labels and placed into blue gift boxes that sport the Polo logo and an attached gift card. Blue and white tissue paper is added to complete the attractive presentation. The gift boxes are then placed into shipping cartons and high-quality blue dunnage paper is added. The carton is then sealed, labeled, and pushed off onto a takeaway conveyor.

Sealed cartons from the regular pack stations merge with those coming from gift box packing as they head back to the same tilt tray sorter that earlier delivered them to the pack stations. Two automatic induction stations weigh the cartons as they are fed onto trays. A fixed scanner immediately reads the bar code on the shipping label and determines which of the eight potential drops to use based on delivery route. These shipping chutes are located on the opposite side of the sorter from the packing stations. Almost all products ship via Fed Ex, with 85% travelling by ground service. Offshore destinations, such as Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, are handled by the US Postal Service. The facility has four outbound docks served by two extenders that ease loading chores.

An efficient returns system is an important component to any dot com. Polo.com sees the returns process as an extension of its customer care. Three processing stations handle returns in an area adjacent to the facility's receiving docks. Most customers use the Polo.com return label originally sent with the order. This label is scanned, bringing the order information up onto the station's computer screen. The customer is then credited.

Next, all items are unpacked by hand and placed into totes. A determination is then made as to the disposition of the item. Usable products either go back to the picking module, or are sent to an outlet store. Damaged items are destroyed. Nearby shelving is used to sort these returns for the various destinations.

Only about 10% of all ordered items are actually returned to Polo.com. That is about half the average industry number for clothing-based distributors. It is also less than Polo.com originally expected.

Since the facility is still ramping up, it is only using a small potion of its capacity, but is already showing solid efficiencies.

"The numbers are right on target, and we are just scratching the surface with capacity," explains Edmonson. "The system was designed for growth with projections to 2004 output."

ValueVision itself is undergoing some changes. The partnership with NBC has spawned another marketing arrangement, as the shopping channel is now known as Shop NBC. Additional growth in this outlet may utilize Bowling Green for fulfillment.

For now, the center will concentrate on its main client, Ralph Lauren Media.

"Ralph Lauren has been very happy with the equipment and the facility," says Fox. "Our packaging and gift requirements were very steep when we came online," adds Edmonson, "but when we got up and running, that is where the system began to shine."