When a major furniture retailer’s marketing campaign is successful, two things happen: product sales increase and product must be delivered quickly – and efficiently. This is a good problem to have, but it is a challenge, and it does need to be addressed. Art Van Furniture turned to Dematic Corp. to address this challenge.
The challenge: more product
Art Van is America’s largest independent furniture retailer. Their thirty retail stores are showrooms and do not carry inventory. As a result, their business model requires fast and efficient processing of orders stored at their central distribution center.
In addition to the challenge of increased volume and order processing at the distribution center, there were also space restrictions. Any expansion of their conventional distribution system would have consumed all available real estate.
The solution: automate it!
To address the space restriction, Dematic implemented a high rise automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) to expand the existing distribution facility without exceeding the available land at the current site. The system that was implemented uses a relatively small amount of space and gains an extensive amount of capacity.
