How Bocov's breaks bottlenecks

摘要

Some stories are good enough to have a sequel. That's the case with Boscov's Department Stores, the largest independent department-store chain in the nation. Boscov's-with $1.2 billion in annual sales-is still family-owned today. Modern first visited Boscov's 395,000 square foot Reading, Pa., distribution center in 2004. Back then, Boscov's faced a bottleneck in distribution: Due to materials handling process limitations, Boscov's could receive almost twice as many cartons per hour as it could ship out. That not only slowed the delivery of product to stores, it required Boscov's to devote valuable space to staging, which restricted the chain's ability to grow its business without a significant investment in more warehouse space. The solution: Instead of adding space, Boscov's added automation, including a three-divert sliding shoe pre-sorter, the splitting of an existing pop-up shipping sorter into two units, and new scanning and control systems.