News
Intralogistic revolution for e-commerce
08.08.2011
A transport bag conveyed by a hanging garments system
Dürkopp Fördertechnik, a member of KNAPP group, promises nothing short of a revolution. Specializing in the clothing-intralogistic sector, Dürkopp has developed a revolutionary solution especially for transacting e-commerce business. Experience has shown that for logistics, the requirements are particularly demanding.
This new development makes its debut in a dynamic market. Clothing merchandisers that previously only sold to retail stores are frequently becoming multi-channel retailers, and are getting into the mail order business. New e-commerce businesses that may have only existed for only a few years are dynamically developing in a sector that is still clearly promising double-digit growth.
The challenge for the market lies in the completely new order structure of these businesses. The retail sector is dominated by relatively few orders per day with high number of articles, providing replenishment products for stores. In contrast, e-commerce manages tens of thousands of orders per day, with each customer order having a low number of articles.
The classic mail order business often accomplished the work with multi-stage picking systems. In part even semi-automatic sorting technology has been used, but this mostly required giant sorting systems with a very large number of target locations, and was often followed by further manual sorting. For the most part, this process required a lot of personnel and was subject to errors.
What is the alternative to these concepts? A transport bag conveyed by a hanging garments system. The bag has room for all the items that would fit in a shopping bag. The idea started with a suggestion from one of our customers, therefore proven concepts used for hanging garments were adapted to flat garments. For future projects, there are no limits in terms of item variety: shoes, accessories, books, and toys, etc. can be easily transported and sorted.
What is special about this solution? Sigurd Völker, Managing Director of Dürkopp Fördertechnik: "In our concept, the batch size is freely selected and customized for optimal order transit time and picking performance. Single items can be added in any sequence to in our system; our logistics system organizes them with an intelligent and very compact sequencing mechanism in the correct sequence. At the packing station we provide only those items for picking that belong to a single customer order. After the pack order has been completed, the next order moves in. A drastic reduction in error cases is therefore possible. The streamlining of all processes leads to a decrease in costs and at the same time an optimized transit time, which is especially important in e-commerce."
The new system is already in use at the first customer with a maximum performance of 10,000 single items per hour and functions to their complete satisfaction, according to Sigurd Völker.