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For the brothers Jochanan and
Nathanaël Bax, their business quite
literally started in their garage in 2003.
The duo were heavily involved with
music and sound equipment and they
were renting out their own gear. They
sourced and re-sold products for the
first time in 2005, and that was also
the year in which the brothers opened
their first webshop.
“Everyone said we were crazy,” recalls
Jochanan Bax. But the figures prove
the contrary. Today, BAX-shop.nl has
evolved into a leading and innovative
player in the market for lighting, sound,
musical instruments, production
equipment and DJ gear. The extensive
product range amounts to over 34,000
SKUs, of which around 95% are directly
available from stock. On peak days in
2014, an impressive 6,500 orders were
despatched from the warehouse in Goes.
However, the growth put the logistics
process – and hence the customer
service level – under ever-greater
pressure. In recent years, the revenue
has increased by between 60 and
150% annually. “It was becoming more
and more difficult to pick the growing
number of orders efficiently,” continues
Bax.
Furthermore it was necessary to
professionalise the operation to
enable the company to fulfil its growth
ambitions. Not only do the brothers still
have plenty of aspirations, but they also
Making great strides
regard them as vital to the company’s
future. “After all, at a certain point in
time you hit the growth ceiling in The
Netherlands,” he says. That’s why BAX-
shop.nl has recently opened webshops
and offices in Germany and France.
The UK, Italy and Spain are being
added to that list this year and Sweden
will follow in 2016, with orders for all of
those countries being shipped from the
distribution centre in Goes.
In order to continue to guarantee
fast delivery and to pave the way for
future growth, the brothers decided to
automate the BAX-shop.nl order pick
process with a sorting system from
Optimus Sorters, based in Wijchen.
They were initially looking for a way
of automating the labour-intensive
inbound process. The immediate
sorting of incoming goods based on
location would enable the picking
routes to be optimised. “But then
we thought – while we’re at it – why
not improve the optimisation of the
outbound process too? That would
give us an even more interesting return
on investment (ROI),” explains Bax.
It didn’t take them long to decide
on Optimus Sorters, comments
the co-owner: “Our regular
logistics consultant had already
worked with them satisfactorily on
several occasions, and a couple
of visits to existing customers
were enough to convince us of
their capabilities too.”
Every morning, the 70m long
OptiSorter, with a total of 130
chutes and a maximum capacity
of 5,000 units per hour, is used
to process the incoming goods.
Items are scanned and fed in
at three feeding stations from
where they are automatically sorted
according to their storage location. “The
sorter has made our inbound process
considerably less labour-intensive and
hence cheaper, generating savings of
up to 40%,” concludes Bax. Because
the Optimus Sorters warehouse control
software communicates directly with the
BAX-shop.nl WMS the purchase orders
are also automatically adjusted in the
system in real time during this process.
From around 2p.m. onwards, the system
then supports the processing of the
outbound goods. Moreover, BAX-shop.
nl can now handle up to 250 orders in a
single run, compared with a maximum of
24 orders per batch previously. Thanks
to the dramatic reduction in walking and
picking times, among other things, the
total ROI is less than 18 months.
As soon as an order is complete the
green pick-to-light lamp illuminates
above the relevant chute. The order is
then packed at one of the 26 packing
tables and subsequently continues on its
way via a conveyor belt below the sorter.
At the end of the conveyor all orders are
weighed, photographed and scanned.
Dispatch sorters then sort them into one
of the nine dispatch lanes. The larger
so-called ‘non-sortable’ items are sorted
and consolidated using an Optimus put-
to-light system.
A period of rapid growth for BAX-shop.nl put its logistics process under substantial pressure. In order
to be able to continue to guarantee good customer service and fast delivery while also facilitating
further growth, the company enlisted the help of Optimus Sorters to automate the process.
42
Logistics Business Magazine | September 2015
Conveying & Sorting