This customer case study example comes from one of our suppliers, Sealed Air.
Improving Operational Efficiency for Online Retailer, Fanatics
The Challenge:
Delivering to over 180 countries, Fanatics is a global supplier of sports fan merchandise including football shirts, shorts, socks, baseball caps, mugs, and other souvenirs. The online retail giant supplies consumers worldwide with official merchandise from some of sports’ biggest names, including Manchester United, Dallas Cowboys, and England Rugby.
From its warehouse in North Manchester, an average of 7,500 packs are shipped every day to meet demand from its hugely popular website. During the holiday peak season, order volumes increase to four times the average amount. The majority of Fanatics packaging operation was handled manually, putting a strain on labor resources and slowing down order fulfillment. Packers worked at eight pack stations manually filling and sealing bags by hand and printing labels and invoices on two printers.
Fanatics needed a bagging and printing packaging system that would optimize existing resources, like labor and warehouse space, and streamline its complex, high-volume e-commerce order fulfillment processes.
The Solution:
The AUTOBAG® brand 850S is a high-speed bagging and printing system uniquely designed to provide enhanced packaging productivity for mail order fulfillment and e-commerce applications. “The main reason for installing the machines was to save space while allowing us to meet some fairly ambitious growth targets,” said Andrew Crozier, Fanatics Operations Manager.
With the help of four AUTOBAG brand high-speed bagging and printing systems, Fanatics has increased its capacity to keep pace with fulfillment demands. The company was able to eliminate most of its manual pack stations and can now process five times the number of orders per hour with the same amount of resources. In addition to optimizing labor and warehouse space, the AUTOBAG brand 850S improves the packing process with its built-in printer that allows the label to be printed directly on the bag for better labeling of soft goods or oddly shaped items.
Results:
- Increased efficiency and throughput velocity by 5X
- Reduced the number of manual pack stations
- Optimized existing labor and warehouse space
- Ability to scale fulfillment operations to accommodate peak season and changes in demand
Evolving Automation For E-Commerce Fulfillment
To continue advancing automation for e-commerce, Sealed Air launched the AUTOBAG brand 850S paper high-speed bagging and printing system. This sustainable solution runs all-paper bags that are curbside recyclable while continuing to deliver efficiency and throughput for fulfillment operations.
To learn more about the AUTOBAG 850S Bagging System, click here.