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Hartevelt fashion logistics optimises their inbound and outbound to enable growth

Hartevelt is a family-run fashion logistics company that exists for well over 70 years. Starting out as a small dry cleaning service, they have now grown to a full service providing firm in fashion logistics. To cope with the growth in customers and increase the throughput of their inbound and outbound logistics they expanded their warehouse with a LR-sorter.

Over the past few years, Hartevelt has been improving their efficiency by utilitzing innovative solutions. In line with this strategy they are the first owner of a Equinox LR-sorter. This sorter will be used to handle their inbound and outbound fashion items.

Roy de Zoete, COO at Hartevelt explains the benefits this sorter brought them: “Previously, we had a lot of manual tasks in our inbound and outbound process. When goods arrived, we had to link each individual item to a location with a barcode scanner. Once all items were put away, we could start our picking process. By separating these tasks, we often had to touch the same items multiple times. A large amount of these items are actually forwarded directly to shops or customers. As we started to grow more and more the need for efficiency increased and we started looking for answers in automation.”

The answer was found in the LR-sorter. This sorter enables Hartevelt to sort the inbound and outbound items, which saves them the step of putting away items that can be forwarded directly. This improves the efficiency and helps them ship items faster, saving time and storage space.

8.000 items per hour is the maximum capacity of the LR-sorter, but this exceeded the requirements. To allow easier induction for the operators, the sorter speed was set to 6.000 items per hour.

Dual purpose sorter
The LR-sorter is used to sort fashion items such as shoes, bags, jackets and accesories. These can be inbound items that are received from Hartevelt’s customers and outbound items. The inbound items are unpacked and inserted into the sorter. They are allocated to a location in the warehouse and sorted accordingly. The outbound items are batch picked from the warehouse and sorted based on their destination. These two sorting presets have been added to the software. The operators can easily select the right sorting program before starting the sorter.

“By separating these tasks, we often had to touch the same items multiple times. A large amount of these items are actually forwarded directly to shops or customers.”

Roy de Zoete, COO at Hartevelt

After installation of the sorter Hartevelt continues their optimisation. Roy continues: “We noticed that additional improvements could be made to improve the efficiency of the sorter. This includes conveyors that automatically move cartons to the operators on the induction platform and full carton take-away conveyors underneath the sorter.”

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More information

To find out more about Hartevelt, please visit their website: hartevelt.net

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