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September 16, 2004
VERMONT CATALOGER PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
The Vermont Country Store "Purveyors of the Practical & Hard-to-Find" recently upgraded their picking, packing and shipping operations. Steady sales growth and the constant desire to improve the working environment for their employees convinced The Vermont Country Store that a number of major system changes needed to be made in their existing operation.
The existing picking, packing and shipping systems were designed to meet the requirements of years past and did not allow for ease of expansion. The picking and packing areas had been designed with upper and lower feed and take-away conveyor lines. Because of changes in product sizes and our ability to re-engineer the existing lines to remove clearance issues, we were able to lower the upper lines and make it easier for both pickers and packers to access both levels.
The existing packing operation had outgrown it's present layout. Packing tables had to be added to the operation to accommodate volume increases, however these new pack tables could not be fed by the feed conveyor and picked orders had to be brought manually to these new stations. By changing the flow of the feed line and re-laying out the packing areas, we were able to add 12 new pack stations and provide access for all the pack stations to the order feed line and the take-away lines feeding shipping.
The most significant change in their operation involved the replacement of the existing manual shipping and parcel manifest system with a new automated system.
The existing system incorporated static scales and hand held scanners to gather the package weight and necessary package information. Once this information had been collected, the packages were either manually sorted or manually pushed onto a take-away conveyor that would feed one of two shipping dock doors.
In the new system, completed orders are conveyed from the new pack areas onto the new shipping mezzanine. Packages are automatically spaced or gapped and one (1) in-motion scale is used to weigh the packages on the fly, an overhead scanning system then scans the information embedded in the package barcodes and a downstream pop-up roller sorter automatically diverts packages to their final destination. Once a package is confirmed to have been successfully diverted, the package weight and shipping information is added to the correct shipping manifest. The system can support multiple carriers and classes, all of which are configurable by the client.
With the implementation of the system changes in picking, packing and shipping, The Vermont Country Store will be able to continue their growth, provide a better work environment and maintain the high level of service their customers have grown to expect.
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