Founded 25 years ago as an electronics retailer, Suning now offers a broad range of electronics and office supplies, books, toys and household goods, cosmetics, fashion items, and groceries in more than 4,000 stores and its standard-setting online platform suning.com. The company successfully applies an online-to-offline (O2O) strategy to create a one-stop-shop shopping experience for its customers by fully linking various distribution channels. SSI SCHAEFER developed a state-of-the-art distribution center for achieving this goal successfully.
With the custom-designed system, Suning is responding to the ongoing boom in omni-channel retail and meeting the growing demand in e-commerce. It is all about high speed with simultaneous delivery quality and flexibility as well as maximum ergonomics in all intralogistics processes. The distribution center stores around 20 million items and processes up to 1.8 million items per day. Maximum availability, safety, and cost-effectiveness round off the demands on the logistics solution to react even more dynamically to the increased market requirements in the face of further expansions for the company.
The Suning logistics center impresses with multiple components – the high-bay warehouse and the miniload system form the backbone of a highly dynamic system solution. In addition, the integration of the Schäfer Carousel System is one major benefit in terms of picking efficiency.
Thanks to the ergonomics@work!® program, not only were the warehouse processes beneficial, but all the employees benefit from sophisticated order picking and work stations. Powerful sorters and a return center supplement the internal material flow. While the existing SAP system is used in warehouse and stock management, the associated WAMAS® logistics software from SSI SCHAEFER demonstrates its strengths at the control level.
But it’s not just the numbers and internal processes that are the deciding factors in the end. Above all, the partnership between Suning and SSI SCHAEFER was, and is, important. In particular, the bundling of the global strength of the intralogistics experts with its local expertise in China was able to contribute to this. The synergies are used perfectly – with a team on site and other specialists guiding the project from Europe.
