AGVs Support Pickers in Hanging Garment Application

NextLevel Logistik is a leading logistics service provider in the fashion sector, offering supply chain management (SCM), logistics and consulting services. Its new 275,000-square-foot facility in Eltmann, Germany, stores 1 million items in its garment hanging system and another million in storage.

By adding an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) system to supplement picking of hanging goods, the company has improved flexibility, efficiency and safety.

“Whatever we ask it to do, it does it,” says NextLevel founder and managing director Henrik Bugiel. “The wide choice of options supporting flexible configurations of transport vehicles—and a very straightforward scalability of the solution—were important criteria in our decision to choose this system. It has impressed us with its reliability, efficiency and safety, which has led us to extend its application.”

The AGV fleet supports picking of hanging goods, and each AGV has been fitted with special fixtures for transporting apparel. A fully automatic goods-in reading process works by using RFID read tunnels for automatic bulk-stock recording of transported goods. With optical track guidance, the AGV fleet does not require any fixed infrastructure or system components for installation. This feature facilitated a rapid implementation and seamless integration into an existing internal process flow for NextLevel Logistik.

Bugiel says the new fleet started work late in the year and has been up and running smoothly.

“This was a flexible and modular transport solution that we were able to implement within a very short project time frame,” Bugiel says. “We are very happy.”

SSI Schaefer Systems

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