Our partnership with Dematic helps to drive operational efficiencies and reduce the overall size and power requirements of our Auckland, New Zealand warehouse, with plans to automate the AS Colour Melbourne distribution centre, with a Dematic Multishuttle goods-to-person solution. We now operate five distribution facilities across the US, UK, AU, and NZ as a wholesaler and retailer. The warehouses are based in Auckland, Melbourne, Los Angeles, North Carolina, and Leighton Buzzard, with the support of our twenty-five retail locations across NZ, AU, and the UK.
Our partnership with Dematic started back in 2020, with the new Multishuttle® Goods-to-Person (GTP) solution going live at the end of 2021, along with a brand new warehouse to meet our unique requirements. Working with Dematic has helped streamline our operations to get customer orders out quickly and accurately. The Multishuttle system has the capability to fulfill small e-commerce orders, replenishments of retail stores, as well as medium and large wholesale orders.
Dematic helped us shift from manual to automated operations which helped us to:
✔️ Better meet current and expected future customer demands
✔️ Increase the accuracy of orders
✔️ Increase efficiency of orders and therefore faster lead times
✔️ Increase the throughput of each worker by a remarkable 344%!
✔️ Real-time visibility of operations
✔️ Reduce overall size and power requirements of the warehouse
“Today we can have orders placed online and be picking them within 30 minutes of the order being received by the WCS and sent down from the Multishuttle to the GTP, and then packed and out the door within a few hours.”
– Lawrence Railton, Managing Director, AS Colour.
Why did we choose to switch?
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Manually picking orders with the use of RF technology and trolleys |
Automated picking system |
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Aisles of stock replenished by forklifts and other equipment |
High-density tote storage with sequenced order picking capabilities |
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Units processed per month: 2,700 cycle counts per month |
Units processed per month: 13,000 cycles per month |
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Product storage is limited and not suitable for growth |
Product storage capacity increased by 25% with capacity for growth |
“We upgraded to a new DC to support future growth of our business and to enable automation of our operations so that we could move from a traditional pick and pack facility to the future. This transformation has future proofed us for where we aspire to be and where we project the business is heading,”
– Justin Carnaby, Head of Logistics, AS Colour.
How does it work?
The Dematic Multishuttle system holds just under 20,000 totes stored across two aisles, 18 levels high. When an order request is placed, the order tote and product tote gets delivered to four GTP workstations where the items are picked from the product tote and placed into the order tote by a warehouse operator. The completed order tote is then conveyed down to the packing dispatch area and then the totes are returned to the Mutlishuttle to be used for future orders.
Dematic provides ongoing maintenance and support to service the system regularly and provide optimisation where possible. “Dematic has been a really strong technology partner, helping us from a global perspective, and we see this as a long-term partnership as we continue to expand as a business in the future,” says Lawrence.
We have plans to automate the AS Colour Melbourne distribution centre, with a Dematic Multishuttle goods-to-person solution.
Take a look yourself, full video here:
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