Automated system solution for hanging items distribution

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psb intralogistics has designed and implemented the new fully automated distribution centre with a storage capacity of 2 million hanging garments for New Look, one of the leading fashion retailers in the UK. The company supplies its 593 British sales outlets from this centre. Due to the high flexibility of psb’s intralogistics equipment, both initial allocations with large quantities and significantly smaller subsequent deliveries can be handled with the same efficiency.
The hanging garments are already transferred to the overhead conveyor system in the delivering truck. All subsequent processes, up to the loading of the delivery vehicles, are seamlessly interlocked with various overhead conveyor systems and most of them are driven fully automatically. After the incoming goods inspection, the garments are stored on storage bars in the fully automated highbay warehouse for hanging garments operated with nine AS/RS cranes in total.
Depending on the current sales trend, the goods are retrieved from the highbay warehouse for hanging garments and held in dynamic buffers. This process organisation ensures short reaction times and that all garments of the current collection are permanently available in all sizes in the shops.
The goods to be delivered to the shops are combined into product blocks for the respective stores using a high-performance sorter and a multi-level matrix sorting system. The hanging garment deliveries are precisely synchronized with the flat goods deliveries. Since they are stored in the same DC and delivered to the respective stores together in mixed trucks, the efficiency of the overall distribution of goods increases considerably.