Fixed path: Sorter handles both inbound and outbound flows

Launched in a garage in 2003, BAX-shop.nl now supplies a product range of more than 34,000 SKUs related to lighting, sound, musical instruments, production equipment and DJ gear. After a period of extreme growth put the company’s logistics process under substantial pressure, an extensive automation project helped accommodate the growth while continuing to guarantee fast delivery.

Of the 34,000 SKUs, around 95% are directly available from stock. On peak days in 2014, more than 6,500 orders were dispatched from the warehouse in Goes, Netherlands.

“It was becoming more and more difficult to pick the growing number of orders efficiently,” says co-founder Jochanan Bax, who said the company also needed to position itself for global growth. BAX-shop.nl has recently opened Web stores and offices in Germany and France. The UK, Italy, Spain and Sweden will follow in 2016, and orders for all countries will be shipped from the Goes DC.

Every morning, the 70-meter-long sorter, with a total of 130 chutes and a maximum capacity of 5,000 units per hour, is used to process the incoming goods. Items are scanned and fed in at three feeding stations from where they are automatically sorted according to their storage location. “The sorter has made our inbound process considerably less labor-intensive, generating savings of up to 40%,” Bax says.

The sorter’s warehouse control system (WCS) communicates directly with the warehouse management system (WMS) to automatically adjust purchase orders in real time. After about 2 p.m., the system then supports the processing of outbound goods. The facility can now handle up to 250 orders in a single run, compared with a maximum of 24 orders per batch previously. Thanks in part to the dramatic reduction in walking and picking times, the total ROI was less than 18 months.

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