How Big Brands Deliver ROI with Green Initiatives
Patagonia’s distribution center in Reno, Nevada, which has been certified by the U.S. Green Building Council, took an environmentally-positive step forward by integrating Dematic modular conveyors, increasing efficiency by 20% and reducing power consumption up to 30% over traditional roller conveyors.
The challenge
In recent years, Patagonia’s catalog and web business has grown quite significantly. During peak season, several thousand orders a day move through this channel. The process for handling direct to consumer was manual and unwieldy, resulting in orders shipped to the wrong address, unmet delivery promises, and high returns costs. This situation is what led Patagonia to automate this process.
Our solution
The solution has both cartons and mail packages move on the same conveyor through the weigh station. A sorter then sorts the orders into different shipping containers, based on whether the goods are to ship parcel or LTL.
To convey the packages, Patagonia chose Dematic modular conveyor. The conveyor not only handles goods of different sizes and weights, it has intelligent controls that gave individual sections the ability to speed up or slow down.
This is important because the weighing station is the bottleneck for the downstream material handling process. The more uniformly items are spaced before entering the weigh station, the better the whole system works. In short, accumulation with superior package control improves the overall system performance.
The conveyor can maintain selectable gapping between conveyable items. This uniform spacing leads to fewer package jams. Jams, of course, cause product damage, but jams also cause more system downtime than mechanical and electrical failures. In contrast, most roller accumulation conveyors allow more than one package to fill a zone. This may create problems since the zone will treat several packages as a single package, causing jams and side-by-sides. The Dematic solution allows a desired gap for maximum buffer, for sorting, or for proper pitch prior to an in-line scale. It also allows the speed to be set from 70 feet-per-minute up to 400 feet-per-minute.
Intelligent controls give individual sections the ability to speed up or slow down. This was important for Patagonia because the weighing station was the bottleneck for the downstream material handling process. The more uniformly items were spaced before entering the weigh station, the better the whole system worked.
One of the largest risks choosing an inflexible material handling system is that changes in order profiles (more case shipments, fewer pallets, etc.) will necessitate new processes and new hardware configurations. Modular, flexible systems lower the risks of a system becoming outdated.
“We designed the conveyor system from the ground up to provide superior availability, high performance, and lower total cost of ownership,” says Michael Hirsch with Dematic. “Compared to conventional conveyor systems, it reduces power consumption up to 30%, reduces labor up to 20%, and conveys a wider variety of product.”
“The modules are engineered to reduce maintenance and designed for fast installation,” Hirsch continues. “Integrated distributed controls provide diagnostics and new levels of user control — with system and unit adjustments to maximize performance and reliability.”
This flexibility helps relieve some of the pressures fulfillment managers face:
- Increasing numbers of SKUs
- The growth of the direct-to-consumer channel
- Increasing demand for more frequent but smaller shipments
Patagonia’s Reno DC ships more than 7 million items annually. These SKUs are a mixture of various sizes and quantities being shipped to end consumers, retail stories, and wholesalers. The DC can handle it all with one facility. And much to the liking of Patagonia, it runs its DC as a very environmentally positive operation.
Michael Hirsch, DematicWe designed the conveyor system from the ground up to provide superior availability, high performance, and lower total cost of ownership.
The results
Patagonia has gone from 3.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees to 0.5 FTE employees for this part of their process. Returns have been greatly reduced. And an unexpected bonus — the system has the ability to turn itself off if not needed. This run-on-demand capability can reduce power consumption by as much as 30% over conventional roller conveyors. For Patagonia, this conveyor system fits right in to the DC's ideal green operating environment.
Technical data
- Reduced power consumption up to 30%
- Increased man-hour efficiency by 20%
- Conveys a wider variety of product