For global brand adidas ensuring an efficient supply of its state-of-the-art sports footwear, apparel and accessories to its customers is a critical issue; one that has been tested in recent years by the rapid expansion of the business.
To support adidas’ high volume of case and pallet throughput Dematic designed a fully automated 200,000 location carton store of 12 miniload cranes, along with an automated high-bay pallet store with 20,000 pallet locations run by five ASRS cranes. Palletized loads leaving the high-bay are either destined for dispatch or may move to one of four stations for carton picking operations.
Control of the whole automated facility at Trafford is orchestrated by DC Director, integrating with adidas’ WMS. The system is highly tuned to maximize synergies in the Ergonomic Picking Stations and to produce a smooth flow of items to the picking operative in sequence with order requirements.
‘DC Director is a lot simpler to use than other systems I’ve seen,’ says Stuart Jones, project manager, global warehousing for adidas Group, and ‘as suppliers Dematic’s software team are most accommodating, easy to work with and very inventive at getting the most out of the system.’
The fully automated 20m high mini-load store has over 300,000 locations and is accessed by 12 cranes each equipped with a special double-deep load handling device designed to handle four different sized loads simultaneously. The system can perform an impressive 800 dual cycles per hour.
