Boohoo

Boohoo Elevates its Game With Retrofit Warehouse

Styles change frequently as customer demands and preferences evolve. A company that lives this reality every day is Boohoo, a UK-based online fashion group with 13 diverse global brands in its impressive portfolio, including Pretty Little Thing, Karen Millen and Debenhams. As with many e-retailers, the company’s fashion-conscious customer base has high order fulfilment expectations — later cut off time and faster delivery are key. In response to its growing portfolio and increasing supply chain pressures, Boohoo embarked on an initiative to retrofit their distribution center in Sheffield with state-of-the-art automation for intake, order processing and shipping.

Prior to the retrofit project, the warehouse operated manually with products stored in free-standing racking, leaving substantial unused space overhead. A primary goal of Boohoo’s warehouse retrofit project was to increase capacity from both a stockholding and throughput perspective to meet growth objectives. Also, the peak trading seasons for Boohoo such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday see volumes spiking significantly.

Dynamic Buffer

The dynamic buffer enables Boohoo to have the right stock in the right place at the right time. It plays a critical role in inventory management and responding to customer demand. Essentially, the buffer is a run of pouches with an item in each pouch. The dynamic buffer contains up to 150,000 items and can process 40,000 units per hour for order fulfilment. The advantage this provides Boohoo lies in the separation of picking and packing. Items can be pre-picked for orders based on a bespoke algorithm that predicts future sales. This makes picking more efficient, whilst maintaining a pool of available stock ready to fulfil customer orders.

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SSI Cuby Shuttle System

Within the Boohoo distribution center, the reserve storage mezzanine can handle c. 2,000 cartons per hour throughput, while the SSI Cuby includes 37 aisles, 1,073 shuttles, 566,544 storage locations. The storage shuttles are feeding pouch loading stations with the overall system designed to deliver up to 40,000 items per hour throughput capacity.

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WAMAS WMS

The necessary intelligence to distribute an assortment of thousands of products with hundreds of new styles per day quickly and error-free is made possible by the WAMAS WMS.
SSI SCHAEFER implemented WAMAS with a unique Phase Zero approach. Part of the WMS was implemented before integrating any of the mechanical solutions. Primarily a risk mitigation approach, Phase Zero accommodated the short timeline for testing the system before peak season began for Boohoo.

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