M&F Western Products: The right automation for the job

M&F Western Products
Sulphur Springs, Texas
total Size: 230,000 square feet
Products: Western wear accessories
Throughput: 20,000 lines per day at peak
SKUs: 12,000 pickable
Shifts per day/Days per week: 1 shift; 5 days per week, plus overtime during peak season
Employees: 100

A new distribution center featuring a warehouse management system (WMS), mobile computing and bar code scanning, conveyor, and three pick zones (including a two-level mezzanine) has eliminated order backlogs at M&F Western Products.  

Receiving: New merchandise is unloaded from shipping containers or trucks in the receiving and shipping area (1). Items are inspected, palletized and entered into the WMS. The system then creates a license plate bar code. Pallets are staged (2) for putaway, or, if an item is out of stock, the WMS generates a replenishment order.

Storage: The WMS directs putaway. Items needed for replenishment will be delivered directly to a picking location in the pick module (3) or mezzanine (4), where they are scanned into a pick location. If there were only a few cases of an item on an inbound shipment, they may be stored in an overstock location directly above a pick location. Otherwise, the WMS will direct the lift truck operator to deliver a pallet to the nearest available location in reserve storage (5). Drivers also have the ability to override the WMS and choose a pick location. Either way, all movements are captured by a bar code scan of the item, the location and the quantity.

Picking: To initiate picking, the WMS sends a task to an order inductor (6) indicating the number of totes needed for that order. If, for instance, the order requires four totes, the order inductor will scan and place four totes on the conveyor. The conveyor routes a tote to one of three picking areas: Either a stand-alone, floor-level picking module (3) or one of two mezzanine levels (4). A tote may visit all three zones to get all of the items required to fill an order. Once the tote arrives in a zone, an order selector in that area scans the tote to a cart that can carry up to 10 totes at a time. The WMS then directs the order selector to a location, where items are batch picked to totes. That process repeats until all of the items in that zone have been picked. Totes are then placed back onto the conveyor and routed to the next zone.

Packing:  Once all the items for a tote have been picked, the tote is conveyed to the packing area (7). Totes may go directly to a pack station or to a recirculation area if other totes are required to complete an order. Fast pack stations (8) are designated for single-item or single-tote orders. Multi-tote pack stations (9) handle orders that include items from multiple totes. Either way, a packer scans the bar code on the first tote at the station and then scans the items for that order into a shipping container.

Shipping: Once all the items are in a container, the packer is asked to verify the weight. If the order appears accurate, the shipping system generates a shipping label. The package is placed onto a takeaway conveyor and sorted (10) to the staging area (2) for shipping (1). There it is loaded onto a pallet for either UPS or FedEx shipping.

System suppliers
System design and integration: enVista
WMS: HighJump
Shipping Software: Creative Logistics (InfoShip)
Conveyor and sortation: Hytrol
Mobile computing: Honeywell
Lift trucks: Crown Equipment, Nissan
Pallet racking and mezzanine: Elite Storage Solutions