Two new sorters support omni-channel fulfillment

Port Logistics Group (PLG) is a logistics, distribution and transportation company serving manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers in a variety of industries. When opening a new crossdocking and transloading facility in New Jersey to handle fulfillment operations for a client’s growing omni-channel business, the company installed a high-speed sliding shoe sorter (Intelligrated, intelligrated.com) and tilt tray sorter (W&H Systems, whsystems.com) to process up to 25 million cartons annually.

“Before working with the integrator, our operation was completely manual,” says Jeffrey Wolpov, CEO of Port Logistics Group. “The automation they designed and installed allowed us to demonstrate to our customer that we could handle their required business volumes.”

In the crossdocking area’s six receiving lines, full cartons are offloaded from an import container onto a powered extendable conveyor. Garments on hangers are offloaded at two receiving doors and staged on trolleys for packing into cartons according to the retailers’ specifications. The cartons are transported to the outbound system and sorted.

Merchandise to be stored at the DC and shipped as individual units is received, unloaded and palletized by SKU. Orders are generated for this merchandise at the store. RF scanners are used to scan each carton and assign it to a tilt-tray sort location.

The single-level tilt-tray sorter consists of 965 tilted trays on an enclosed conveyor system, operating at 120 feet per minute. This presents about 60 trays per minute past each of the two induction areas. There are three manual inductions at each end of the sorter, which operates at a maximum capacity of 7,200 pieces per hour.

As the carrying trays reach their discharge point, the warehouse control system (W&H Systems, whsystems.com) releases the trays’ bottom edges. Products slide into a chute where they accumulate. Each side of the tilt-tray sorter has 142 locations, where operators pick the pieces out of holding trays and pack them into cartons. When the carton is full or the wave is complete, the operator pushes the carton onto a takeaway conveyor. The cartons are then transported to an accumulation conveyor, which feeds a tape-sealing machine, and then onto the outbound system.

Cartons are merged into one line with a high-speed combiner in the outbound crossdock area. The sliding shoe shipping sorter diverts cartons into 23 pitched gravity conveyor lines designed to accumulate cartons for either processing or truck loading. This sorter operates at a maximum capacity of up to 6,000 cartons per hour.

PLG has achieved record production numbers with on-time delivery performance of 99.7% annually. The tilt-tray sorter has processed up to 380,000 units in a week and has increased individual labor productivity by 50% with no overtime.