If you’re like many other material handling and logistics professionals, you are constantly challenged to handle an ever-changing mix of parcel sizes and volumes while dealing with limited space. As regional last mile delivery providers continue to expand their territorial reach, they are facing challenges of how to cost effectively add regional sort stations and cross dock operations. Developing an MHE solution that can handle daily throughput and be capable of flexing for peak can be a daunting task. Non-conforming or Non-compatible packages can create additional complications. Many regional last mile carriers are investing in more automated and semi-automated processes to handle the variability and increasing volume. Often times combining manual and automated sort solutions to handle the diverse mix of parcels. Parcel mix has become a real challenge for carriers and MHE providers alike. As the average item count per parcel continues to decrease the volume of smalls has sky rocketed. Smalls come is all shapes, sizes, and packaging media. Many of the existing MHE solutions in place form the days of cardboard cartons struggle to process polybags, bubble mailers, and the reduced carton sizes being shipped today. One solution that Systems In Motion (SIM) has developed utilizes a sliding shoe sorter for cartons and a sweep sorter for smalls. This particular customer was facing several issues; an increasing number of smalls, space constraints, and the need to relabel products for routing. The existing MHE consisted of inbound conveyor, 3 sort lines for outing relabeling, a single scan tunnel and a sliding shoe sorter. To effectively handle the increased smalls volume the decision was made to add a separate smalls sorter that would deliver parcels to the same outbound lanes as the existing shoe sorter, and add an isolated inbound and relabel process. The inbound and relabel MHE was tucked into a small area of an existing mezzanine, using two stations and up to 4 associates, the smalls are inducted onto an incline conveyor, transported to a small ARB diverter table to separate the volume and divert to the two stations. Associates then scan the parcel, print and apply the routing label and send the parcel to the smalls sorter. The smalls sorter was designed and built to install directly over top of the sliding shoe sorter. By doing this we saved floor space, and utilized the same drop locations. The smalls sorter utilized a simple design with sweep arms and plastic table top conveyor to provide a smooth, non-snag surface for the poly bags and bubble mailers. The bigs and smalls can now divert onto the same outbound sort lanes keeping the overall system foot print small, saving valuable floor space. Let us show you how we can help solve your parcel and space saving solutions. In this video you can see how we help an organization with parcel mix and space saving. Click here to view video. Contact us today for more information. sales@systeminmotion.com
