De Bijenkorf has been a strong Dutch brand for more than 150 years. Established in 1870 as a small haberdashery, it now has flagship stores in Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam. The company mainly sells luxury clothing, fashion accessories, cosmetics and perfume, as well as furniture and home accessories.
De Bijenkorf decided to create a new 32,159m2 central warehouse in Tilburg to supply its seven national stores, as well as e-commerce orders from The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany, Austria and France.
It required an automated solution that offered a sortation capacity of up to 8,000 items per hour, and could handle both e-commerce multi-item and store orders. In total, the Tilburg warehouse will house 210,000 unique SKUs and more than three million items.
To fulfil de Bijenkorf’s requirements, Vanderlande delivered its advanced AIRTRAX Pocket – the first large-scale system of its kind in The Netherlands. An omni-channel solution, it supports three areas at the Tilburg site: B2C orders (online orders to consumers); B2B store orders storing ‘fast movers’; and the process of e-commerce returns. It is operated on de Bijenkorf’s behalf by CEVA Logistics, a leading provider of supply chain solutions.
AIRTRAX Pocket is an innovative and reliable solution for transporting, sequencing and storing hanging goods. It delivers unrivalled benefits throughout any kind of hanging goods handling operation and is designed to move significant volumes of goods efficiently.
There are approximately 48,000 pockets within the Tilburg system and around 35,000 of those are used primarily for storage.
Vanderlande’s solution is a fully integrated part of de Bijenkorf’s omni-channel warehouse. It not only helps reduce lead and transportation times, but also improves the company’s ability to handle its stock efficiently.
AIRTRAX Pocket offers de Bijenkorf a loading capacity of 8,000 pockets per hour. Using the Vanderlande solution, the company can handle around 95% of its 210,000 SKUs.
In addition, AIRTRAX Pocket offers de Bijenkorf the opportunity to facilitate variable pick batches and uniform processing, as well as reduce operational complexity.
CEVA Logistics: “The solution has returned huge benefits in terms of reduced picking hours and increased productivity. In the end, both de Bijenkorf and CEVA Logistics are very happy with the result.”