Barwil Sets Table for Seasonal Success
With new picking technologies, retail distributor Bardwil doubled its throughput rates to meet faster order turnaround times.
Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large, Modern Materials Handling, November 2007
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If you set your Thanksgiving table with a linen tablecloth, placemats or napkins from a retailer like Kohl’s, JC Penney, Linens ‘n Things, or Bed Bath & Beyond, there’s a good chance they were manufactured by Bardwil Industries, a leading supplier of linens to major retailers across the country.
And when it came to filling your order, there’s also a good chance that Bardwil had a week or less to accept the order and get it out the door.
“We used to get a month to send an order to a retailer’s DC, and they would allocate the inventory to their stores,” explains Ed Bracconeri Jr., Bardwil’s vice president for domestic operations and the manager of fulfillment operations at the company’s 150,000 square foot distribution center in Jersey City, N.J. “Now their inventory is right here. We get a week to fill a replenishment order for a store. If we can’t make the ship window, we’ll lose the order, or they’ll hit us with a charge-back fee.”
To meet those shorter lead times without increasing the number of people filling orders, Bardwil replaced bar code scanning in the active pick areas with a pick-to-light order picking system (AL Systems, 973-586-8500, www.alsysinc.com). The system uses lights to direct workers to the right picking location and to identify the number of items to be picked to a shipping container.
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