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| The Call of the Wild | ||||||
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Pierau Planung to ensure capacity increase at Sportler's distribution centre.
Sportler AG are one of the leading specialist retailers of sports and outdoor goods in Europe. The company's retail and e-commerce sales are increasing rapidly. The South Tyrolean specialist for alpine sports goods has appointed Pierau Planung to develop an innovative concept to increase capacity. The central warehouse in Bolzano handles several millions articles per year. In peak times, hundreds of shipments are fulfilled each day – the continuous and largest growth is in e-commerce sales. Sportler is aiming to increase revenue even further. The current capacity of the central warehouse is not sufficient to cover such an anticipated growth in sales. After completing the logistics changes, Sportler will have at its disposal 7,800 sqm of modern logistics facilities for the fulfillment of e-commerce sales and branch supplies. To achieve this, Sportler and Pierau Planung will proceed in two stages. Stage 1: Pierau Planung will determine whether the projected capacity increase can be achieved within the existing facility. Current data will be collected and future values will be projected. In parallel, they will modernize the existing technical equipment to achieve an optimum performance from the current logistics facilities. Two of the factors in Sportler's success – the company is part of the Oberrauch Group and run more than 20 retail outlets in Northern Italy and Austria – are “profit from synergies” and “strong teamwork”. Pierau Planung has tried to reflect this spirit in the joint project work. From the very first planning stage on, the customer, through a series of workshops, was involved in every phase of the planning process. Current values were recorded on site and the impact of increasing revenue using existing equipment were calculated and assessed. “This project is a perfect example how we can increase immediately the throughput of existing equipment by introducing small technical and organisational measures and by suggesting a change in the usage of available space without interrupting operations”, relates Arne Pierau. In stage 2, the productivity will be increased even more by introducing a fully automated storage system. Pierau Planung will implement a dynamic sorting and packing system, e.g. a shuttle or a tower system. The advantages of such systems are apparent: increase of storage and order-picking capacity, faster shipment processing, buffering of load variations and very high item availability. In addition, the system will carry out all vertical transportations within the building. In order to adapt this concept ideally to Sportler’s business development, the system can be developed in stages. Even when the maximum planned capacity is reached, it will not require any changes to the current building. In order to explain their customer relationship Sportler use a sports metaphor, describing their customers as “the hub in the wheel of the company bicycle”. The customers are the focus of all their efforts. Therefore, as part of this philosophy, Sportler focus not only on avoiding returns but also on producing an efficient returns process. Also, delivery times of articles ordered online should be further reduced in the interest of the customer. Challenges Pierau Planung is willingly taking on. |
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