German casual fashion brand, BRAX, founded in 1888, has sales of over €280 million through some 1,400 concessions and 84 of its own shops in Germany Belgium, Russia, Latvia, Ukraine and China.
It launched an e-commerce operation in 2009, and the expanding range led BRAX to invest in its logistics operations at its central warehouse in Herford, Germany.
The company installed the Pick-it-Easy Pocket solution from KNAPP at the site last year. The handling system spans three levels and accommodates 200,000 articles.
The label on each pair of trousers is scanned and the item is allocated to a roller adapter, allowing each pair of trousers to be traced throughout the entire system.
Items are divided into sorting runs and transferred to one of 30 batch buffer lines. A matrix sorter creates an arbitrary sequence of trousers and, by decoupling three sorting steps, reaches a speed of some 6,000 items per hour.
The trousers are transported to the multifunctional goods-out buffer where any value-added services can be carried out, and then arrive at 20 packing workstations. Here, they are decoupled from the roller adapters and packed for shipping.
Orders received by noon are delivered next-day or within a maximum of 48 hours. The benefits have been increased productivity, energy efficiency, high storage density and faster deliveries.
