Every time an employee has to stop and actually touch a package at BRG Sports — the manufacturer of football helmets, child safety seats and other plastic products — it costs the company time, money and efficiency.
So when the company was designing its new 813,000 square food combination manufacturing facility and distribution center in Rantoul, Illinois, its goal was to eliminate as many of these “touch points” as possible in order to streamline efficiency.
When it is finally completed next year, the BRG Sports complex will have consolidated eight different DC and four brands under one roof. The company currently manages 23,000 SKUs and ships about 10,000 pallets per month.
Finding a Solution for a Complex Environment
Because it makes everything from Riddell football helmets to Bell cycling headgear to Giro bike racks and bicycle child carriers, the company caters to everybody from big box retailers to smaller, specialty sporting goods stores and even neighborhood organizations and school athletic departments.
The challenge was to design a warehouse management system (WMS) that could coordinate between 44,000 and 60,000 pallet locations, a full two miles of conveyors, and delivery systems that can support up to 60 cartons per minute in mixed-case and 100 cartons per minute case/split case modules … all while minimizing employee touch points.
The solution was a warehouse control system designed by Numina Group that enables parallel pick, pack and ship operations across brands, channels and order profiles. The WCS times the release of work and synchonizes activities so the proper cartons for each order arrive at their designated shipping area exactly when they are needed in the least amount of time and with the fewest amount of employee travel.
Hands-Free, No-Touch Delivery Systems
The system utilizes very narrow aisle storage in order to optimize space, as well as hands-free, multi-modal data collection tools to direct picking activities. These include voice and ring scanning.
The WCS also uses automated materials handling equipment such as conveyors, sortation equipment, and automated print-and-apply and packing systems to get the job done.
Fortunately, the company had one thing going for it: Because it was building an entirely new facility, it could design from the ground up, said Lewis Hornsby, vice president of global logistics and fulfillment.
“We didn’t want to automate our existing processes,” Hornsby told Modern Materials Handling. “Instead, we wanted to use automation to streamline our processes.”
Now, about 80% of all orders are completely automated, with no touches from human employees. That means fewer mistakes, faster operations, and improved efficiency.
“Although we ship multiple brands in split and full cases, to the automation, an order is an order and a box is a box,” Hornsby said.
When the Rantoul facility first came online in October, BRG Sports started closing facilities in other locations in order to integrate their operations under one roof.
“We had a significant number of people doing manual processes while we spoon-fed the automation,” Hornsby said. The result has been improvements in customer service and more synergies between brands and product lines.
A future phase calls for the facility to have the ability to pick product directly from assembly lines to the packing station and shipping dock in response to real-time demand.
“We’re not there yet,” Hornsby said. “But the design and automated conveyor is in place to do that.”