INEX Partners, a subsidiary of the retail company SOK, has for the past ten years been picking all general merchandise items at the Sipoo site in Finland using automated and semi-automated logistics systems from the general contractor WITRON Logistik + Informatik.
The 731,945ft2 facility near Helsinki used to exclusively supply the company’s 1,000 stores yearly with more than 300,000 different items. Now, the growing e-commerce company and the processing of click + collect orders will also be integrated.
The INEX distribution centre in Sipoo has been designed for the processing of more than one million units including clothing, cosmetics, sports equipments, electronic equipment, media, gardening equipment, and furniture. Many of the non-food items are subject to fashion and music trends, or seasonal changes, which causes a constant change of products, therefore, flexibility is essential to the operation.
WITRON has already delivered a degree of flexibility for the supply of approximately 1,000 stores in the network.
The purpose of SOK and INEX is to process a wide variety of distribution channels centrally from a single logistics centre in a cost-efficient way. The solution is set to become operational in Q1 2022.
At the logistics facility, employees use pick-to-light technology and pick-to-voice technology.
In the following consolidation process, all small-volume and large-volume items are scanned and manually assigned to the respective customer order in a rack shelf, then packed and prepared for dispatch.
