Features/Benefits Provided: Combines e-commerce and traditional sales. 66% reduction in labor. Increases productivity while eliminating errors. Reduces downtime.

When a publishing organization needed to combine all their sales and returns into one high throughput, labor efficient, accurate system they integrated an automated storage and retrieval solution. The heart of their system is a bank of 12 horizontal carousels. The horizontal carousels are arranged into three workstations with four carousels per workstation to gain maximum efficiency. The implementation of the horizontal carousel system increased overall productivity of the distribution by 30%.

The publisher is a supplier of wholesale books and literature to Christian bookstores and currently ships up to 1,475 orders consisting of 4,000 to 8,500 lines per day. In addition, they handle up to 50,000 lines of returns daily. Due to the implementation of their e-commerce site, orders are coming in faster than ever, but it's not a problem for the carousels to keep up. The horizontal carousels have dramatically reduced the man-hours previously required to pick and return literature. Only four people are needed to operate the carousels, in comparison to 12 pickers required to operate the previous systems that utilized static shelving. Downtime previously associated with cycle counting has also been eliminated.

A pick-and-pass methodology is used to pick orders. This method allows the literature to be located in any one of the carousels, eliminating multiple positions and reducing inventory. At each workstation, the carousels rotate to the appropriate cell and the pick-to-light tree indicates where the literature is located and the picking quantity. An order is sent from one workstation to the next until the order is complete. To return literature, the SKU is scanned, associated with a tote and put on a conveyor to the correct carousel. The pick-to-light trees indicate which carousel, carrier, shelf and cell to place the SKU.

This publisher began growing to the point where there was simply no more room and they had to figure out a faster way to process orders while eliminating errors. Implementing a horizontal carousel system has allowed this publisher to expand while increasing productivity.

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