How smart intralogistics solutions can protect margins and grow sales
For fashion retailers, protecting margin is critical to profitability and business growth. However, winning sales without significant markdowns is far from easy as competition on the high street and online is fierce, with fast stock turns, ever-demanding customers, later and later cut-offs and punishing levels of returns, often at 30% or more. Customers expect immediacy in terms of despatch, delivery and money back on returns, along with continuity of product offerings and services across all channels.
Intelligent intralogistics holds the answer. Fast, agile fulfilment using advanced ferag.skyfall pouch technology tackles all these issues and introduces a whole range of possibilities for boosting productivity, responsiveness and flexibility, when its needed most. Ferag’s market leading technology uses available overhead space to convey buffer and sort both hanging garments and flat items, such as shoes and flat pack goods, at processing speeds of up to 25,000 units per hour. And Ferag’s modular design approach offers the flexibility and scalability to easily expand the system to match the growth needs of the business.
The same high-speed pouch sorter used for fulfilling ecommerce orders can also be deployed to create store friendly sequenced consignments for high-street shops – making shelf replenishment a simple, smooth task that maximises product availability and frees up shop assistants for spending more time with the customer.
Joined-up thinking
Many businesses create the necessary scale for automation by consolidating inventory into one omni-channel facility that serves both high street stores and ecommerce channels. Pooling stock in this way not only offers the scale and throughput needed for automation, but also holds the potential to generate huge flexibility, where fashion goods flow quickly and smoothly to satisfy demand, whether it be on the high street, click‘n’collect, or ecommerce. With this agility, there are no longer complications around moving stock between locations or being out of stock in one channel only to find excess in another.
Using returns for strategic advantage
A single automated omni-channel ferag.skyfall facility can also handle returns super-efficiently too. Processing returned items swiftly and buffering them close to dispatch makes them quickly and readily available for sale again – helping to boost sales and reducing the need for markdowns. With industrywide returns rates of 30% and above, slick returns processing using dynamic buffering can deliver a hidden pot of gold.
Dynamic warehousing with ferag.skyfall pouch technology increases product availability, saves space, cuts costs and helps optimise workforce allocation. Consolidating inventory in a single, highly automated omni-channel facility can drive greater efficiencies, improve productivity and boost responsiveness – creating an engine for growth that generates more opportunities for sales with higher margins.
Intelligence and hardware from a single source
As a leading integrator of advanced intralogistics solutions to the fashion sector, Ferag has grown over many decades to become a reliable single-source provider of well-engineered hardware combined with intelligent proprietary software, branded ferag.doWarehouse. For fashion businesses this means seamless integration into existing systems, end-to-end automation from goods receipt to shipping, optimised returns processing for higher efficiency, greater flexibility and performance during seasonal peaks and easily scalable solutions for fast-growing businesses.
In particular, Ferag’s pouch technology lends itself to ecommerce operations, allowing for greater wave picking efficiency, with late order cut-offs of around 10pm for a promise of delivery to the customer first-thing the next day. The speed and reliability of ferag.skyfall, the ultra-fast automated pouch sorter solution, enables the retailer to gain greater operational efficiencies by accumulating orders in advance of a final pick-wave at 10pm. With processing speeds of up to 25,000 units per hour orders can be picked, sorted, packed and dispatched within the shortest time window, giving fashion brands the keen competitive edge of a late cut-off with an early next day delivery.
For consumers fast, reliable fulfilment and delivery is often a decisive factor when purchasing a fashion item and a positive experience is likely to result in repeat sales and recommendations on social media. However, a late delivery of a party dress has the potential to cause great distress and may lead to negative reviews, with the loss of future sales, so a reliable fulfilment process is essential. Of course, pick accuracy is important too, as a mispicked item is likely to be disappointing for the customer, as well as costly to the business. To the advantage of our customers, smart Ferag automation enables exceptionally high pick accuracy.
A light touch: Auto induction and unloading
Fewer hands make lighter work. Ferag has developed an advanced automated induction process where pouches automatically open at an induction station, the operator scans a product, passes it down a chute and it drops into the awaiting pouch. The process is fast and efficient.
Similarly, Ferag has also introduced auto-unloading technology with three levels of performance depending upon product characteristics and gentle handling requirements. Contingent on the items, between 1500 and 2200 units per hour can be automatically unloaded from pouches at packing stations. Driving performance, the rate at which orders are presented at the packing station can determine the pace of packing.
Interestingly, when comparing traditional goods-to-person operations, where you may have six to twelve open orders at the packing station, with a ferag.skyfall pouch system there can be a hundred or more open orders, simply by keeping them in a dynamic buffer near to the packing station. Items can quickly be called from the buffer as required, providing greater flexibility and speed.
A growing number of leading fashion brands are successfully using the ferag.skyfall pouch sorter solution to leverage competitive advantage.