Faced with mounting customer demands for swift order turnaround and perfect accuracy, swimsuit manufacturer A.H. Schreiber took a deep breath and invested in an automated labeling and sortation system.
Peter Bradley is an award-winning career journalist with more than three decades of experience in both newspapers and national business magazines. His credentials include seven years as the transportation and supply chain editor at Purchasing Magazine and six years as the chief editor of Logistics Management.
A.H. Schreiber may not be a household name, but millions of women and girls know its products. The privately held company is one of the nation's largest manufacturers and distributors of women's and girls' swimwear, producing some 14 million swimsuits each year under brand names like Badgley Mischka, Beach Native, Delta Burke, and Longitude.
Schreiber distributes all of its swimwear from a 176,000-square-foot distribution center in Bristol, Tenn., shipping about 900,000 cartons each year to customers throughout the country. "We distribute swimwear to virtually anyone who sells it, from the surfside shop to major department stores," says Sandy Nash, the company's warehouse manager.
For years, the company relied on manual processes to fill all of those orders, literally lining up cartons on the floor and sending workers around to apply shipping labels by hand. But about three years ago, it realized that would no longer be enough to keep up with the demands of one of its largest customers, Target.
Like most retailers, Target expects its suppliers to conform to strict specifications when it comes to labeling and delivering shipments to its 26 DCs, and it requires swift turnaround of even the largest, most complex orders. As Schreiber struggled to comply with all of Target's demands, its overtime costs soared and accuracy began to suffer. It was clear that the company was going to have to make some changes.
Man vs. machine Although the swimwear maker was fully committed to meeting Target's demands, the Schreiber team knew it wouldn't be easy. Schreiber ships a total of eight to 10 trailerloads to Target a week— sending shipments three times a week during peak season and twice weekly the rest of the time. Turnaround times are tight: From the time Target sends the Schreiber corporate office an order, the company has just three days to the ship date. "We receive pick tickets on Monday and ship Wednesday, or we receive pick tickets on Wednesday and ship Friday," Nash says. "We know the destination at that time, but we do not know which DCs' [orders] will be combined together in a load until later in the process."
The tight deadlines put a lot of stress on Schreiber's order fulfillment operation. "Our old method of handling Target orders was to actually pull all the product and line it up on the floor," Nash says. "It took up a tremendous amount of floor space. We would have people taking labels and going skid to skid applying labels to cartons and transferring the cartons to another skid. To accomplish this required a lot of people and a lot of overtime."
The manual system also led to mislabeling, which resulted in chargebacks from the customer. "We had to be faster and more accurate," Nash says.
To address these problems, Schreiber decided to invest in an automated labeling and sortation system to handle the Target orders. Nash is candid about the reasoning. "Any time you use a machine instead of a person, you become more reliable and accurate, and you save on labor," he says.
After reviewing its options, the company decided to go with a compliance labeling and carton sortation system from Cornerstone Automation Systems Inc., or CASI. The system provides automatic shipping labeling, a software interface to Schreiber's software management system, and sortation software plus hardware that includes accumulation conveyor, scanners, a bi-directional heavy-duty case sortation system, and label applicators.
The system was installed about three years ago.
Scan, sort, repeat Today, Target's orders flow smoothly through the facility with minimal human intervention. Orders received from the retailer are released from Schreiber's homegrown enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the CASI system. The Schreiber system produces a separate pick ticket for each destination DC. Workers scan the cartons as they place them onto an accumulation conveyor, where the cartons are staged in zones ahead of the labeling section. The system spaces the cartons for optimum system speed and squares up the cartons to ensure proper label application.
In-line scanners read the Schreiber bar code and send that information back to the ERP system, which then identifies the product and relays the information to the printer. The printer produces a Uniform Code Council (UCC) 128 compliance bar-code label in the customer's preferred format and applies it according to the customer's requirements. (In Target's case, that means that on cartons less than five inches tall, the label must be applied one inch from the bottom.) Another scanner reads the label to ensure it is legible and in the right location.
The cartons then move to the sorter, where they are diverted onto a gravity conveyor to one of eight outbound lanes.
Each of those lanes is set up for three Target distribution centers.
Going for an A To date, Schreiber has realized multiple benefits from the CASI system. To begin with, accuracy problems are history, says Nash. "Now, the carton is automatically routed to the correct DC, and we have the correct labels with the correct products," he says. "We have seen a reduction in chargebacks. We have also seen a side benefit. When we had hand-applied labels, it took half a day just to print the labels." Installing the machines has shortened and simplified the process, he reports.
Along with boosting accuracy, the new system has enabled Schreiber to reduce both headcount and overtime. The savings in labor and compliance costs from the Target account alone paid for the system in less than two years, according to Nash.
Based on its positive experience with the Target orders, A.H. Schreiber recently expanded the system to include orders from JC Penney, another major customer. Penney, Nash says, is in some ways more demanding than Target. Because of the way the company's transportation management system (TMS) handles routing, Schreiber has about 24 hours to turn around an order.
Adding Penney to the system required some modification. For example, Schreiber had to add another in-line printer that could apply a label to the top of a carton (as opposed to the side) to meet Penney's requirements.
Incorporating Penney's orders into the system also slowed the operation down. The system had initially handled about 20 cartons a minute, or about 1,200 per hour, Nash says. Modifications made to the system to accommodate the Penney orders have cut that to about 800 an hour. Even so, Nash remains pleased with the performance of the CASI system, which now handles about 20 percent of the DC's total output. And he considers the equipment purchased to meet Penney's needs to be money well spent. In fact, Nash is certain that Schreiber got a return on that investment in the current peak shipping season (which runs roughly from the end of November through June).
Beyond the monetary savings, Nash sees one further benefit to using the CASI system that's not easily quantified but may prove to be the most important of all: customer retention. "We have report cards with every customer," he says, referring to the retailers' practice of grading suppliers on compliance. "We want to be an A supplier." Nash explains that in the high-stakes retail business, earning top marks is more than a matter of pride. At a time when some retailers are eliminating their third- and fourth-tier suppliers, good compliance scores can be essential to keeping the business.
States across the Southeast woke up today to find that the immediate weather impacts from Hurricane Helene are done, but the impacts to people, businesses, and the supply chain continue to be a major headache, according to Everstream Analytics.
The primary problem is the collection of massive power outages caused by the storm’s punishing winds and rainfall, now affecting some 2 million customers across the Southeast region of the U.S.
One organization working to rush help to affected regions since the storm hit Florida’s western coast on Thursday night is the American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN). As it does after most serious storms, the group continues to marshal donated resources from supply chain service providers in order to store, stage, and deliver help where it’s needed.
Support for recovery efforts is coming from a massive injection of federal aid, since the White House declared states of emergency last week for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Affected states are also supporting the rush of materials to needed zones by suspending transportation requirement such as certain licensing agreements, fuel taxes, weight restrictions, and hours of service caps, ALAN said.
E-commerce activity remains robust, but a growing number of consumers are reintegrating physical stores into their shopping journeys in 2024, emphasizing the need for retailers to focus on omnichannel business strategies. That’s according to an e-commerce study from Ryder System, Inc., released this week.
Ryder surveyed more than 1,300 consumers for its 2024 E-Commerce Consumer Study and found that 61% of consumers shop in-store “because they enjoy the experience,” a 21% increase compared to results from Ryder’s 2023 survey on the same subject. The current survey also found that 35% shop in-store because they don’t want to wait for online orders in the mail (up 4% from last year), and 15% say they shop in-store to avoid package theft (up 8% from last year).
“Retail and e-commerce continue to evolve,” Jeff Wolpov, Ryder’s senior vice president of e-commerce, said in a statement announcing the survey’s findings. “The emergence of e-commerce and growth of omnichannel fulfillment, particularly over the past four years, has altered consumer expectations and behavior dramatically and will continue to do so as time and technology allow.
“This latest study demonstrates that, while consumers maintain a robust
appetite for e-commerce, they are simultaneously embracing in-person shopping, presenting an impetus for merchants to refine their omnichannel strategies.”
Other findings include:
• Apparel and cosmetics shoppers show growing attraction to buying in-store. When purchasing apparel and cosmetics, shoppers are more inclined to make purchases in a physical location than they were last year, according to Ryder. Forty-one percent of shoppers who buy cosmetics said they prefer to do so either in a brand’s physical retail location or a department/convenience store (+9%). As for apparel shoppers, 54% said they prefer to buy clothing in those same brick-and-mortar locations (+9%).
• More customers prefer returning online purchases in physical stores. Fifty-five percent of shoppers (+15%) now say they would rather return online purchases in-store–the first time since early 2020 the preference to Buy Online Return In-Store (BORIS) has outweighed returning via mail, according to the survey. Forty percent of shoppers said they often make additional purchases when picking up or returning online purchases in-store (+2%).
• Consumers are extremely reliant on mobile devices when shopping in-store. This year’s survey reveals that 77% of consumers search for items on their mobile devices while in a store, Ryder said. Sixty-nine percent said they compare prices with items in nearby stores, 58% check availability at other stores, 31% want to learn more about a product, and 17% want to see other items frequently purchased with a product they’re considering.
Ryder said the findings also underscore the importance of investing in technology solutions that allow companies to provide customers with flexible purchasing options.
“Omnichannel strength is not a fad; it is a strategic necessity for e-commerce and retail businesses to stay competitive and achieve sustainable success in 2024 and beyond,” Wolpov also said. “The findings from this year’s study underscore what we know our customers are experiencing, which is the positive impact of integrating supply chain technology solutions across their sales channels, enabling them to provide their customers with flexible, convenient options to personalize their experience and heighten customer satisfaction.”
Transportation industry veteran Anne Reinke will become president & CEO of trade group the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) at the end of the year, stepping into the position from her previous post leading third party logistics (3PL) trade group the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), both organizations said today.
Meanwhile, TIA today announced that insider Christopher Burroughs would fill Reinke’s shoes as president & CEO. Burroughs has been with TIA for 13 years, most recently as its vice president of Government Affairs for the past six years, during which time he oversaw all legislative and regulatory efforts before Congress and the federal agencies.
Before her four years leading TIA, Reinke spent two years as Deputy Assistant Secretary with the U.S. Department of Transportation and 16 years with CSX Corporation.
As the hours tick down toward a “seemingly imminent” strike by East Coast and Gulf Coast dockworkers, experts are warning that the impacts of that move would mushroom well-beyond the actual strike locations, causing prevalent shipping delays, container ship congestion, port congestion on West coast ports, and stranded freight.
However, a strike now seems “nearly unavoidable,” as no bargaining sessions are scheduled prior to the September 30 contract expiration between the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX) in their negotiations over wages and automation, according to the transportation law firm Scopelitis, Garvin, Light, Hanson & Feary.
The facilities affected would include some 45,000 port workers at 36 locations, including high-volume U.S. ports from Boston, New York / New Jersey, and Norfolk, to Savannah and Charleston, and down to New Orleans and Houston. With such widespread geography, a strike would likely lead to congestion from diverted traffic, as well as knock-on effects include the potential risk of increased freight rates and costly charges such as demurrage, detention, per diem, and dwell time fees on containers that may be slowed due to the congestion, according to an analysis by another transportation and logistics sector law firm, Benesch.
The weight of those combined blows means that many companies are already planning ways to minimize damage and recover quickly from the event. According to Scopelitis’ advice, mitigation measures could include: preparing for congestion on West coast ports, taking advantage of intermodal ground transportation where possible, looking for alternatives including air transport when necessary for urgent delivery, delaying shipping from East and Gulf coast ports until after the strike, and budgeting for increased freight and container fees.
Additional advice on softening the blow of a potential coastwide strike came from John Donigian, senior director of supply chain strategy at Moody’s. In a statement, he named six supply chain strategies for companies to consider: expedite certain shipments, reallocate existing inventory strategically, lock in alternative capacity with trucking and rail providers , communicate transparently with stakeholders to set realistic expectations for delivery timelines, shift sourcing to regional suppliers if possible, and utilize drop shipping to maintain sales.
National nonprofit Wreaths Across America (WAA) kicked off its 2024 season this week with a call for volunteers. The group, which honors U.S. military veterans through a range of civic outreach programs, is seeking trucking companies and professional drivers to help deliver wreaths to cemeteries across the country for its annual wreath-laying ceremony, December 14.
“Wreaths Across America relies on the transportation industry to move the mission. The Honor Fleet, composed of dedicated carriers, professional drivers, and other transportation partners, guarantees the delivery of millions of sponsored veterans’ wreaths to their destination each year,” Courtney George, WAA’s director of trucking and industry relations, said in a statement Tuesday. “Transportation partners benefit from driver retention and recruitment, employee engagement, positive brand exposure, and the opportunity to give back to their community’s veterans and military families.”
WAA delivers wreaths to more than 4,500 locations nationwide, and as of this week had added more than 20 loads to be delivered this season. The wreaths are donated by sponsors from across the country, delivered by truckers, and laid at the graves of veterans by WAA volunteers.
Wreaths Across America
Transportation companies interested in joining the Honor Fleet can visit the WAA website to find an open lane or contact the WAA transportation team at trucking@wreathsacrossamerica.org for more information.