Lifetime Brands Builds Energy Efficient Distribution Center

In 1999, Lifetime Brands Inc. began laying plans for a Greenfield distribution center in New Jersey that would consolidate its three manual distribution operations into a single, highly efficient and automated facility. In a staged approach over eight years, the company built out not only the distribution center's (DC) material handling equipment but also the DC's physical size to accommodate its needs, expanding its total space to 700,000 square feet. But this was to be no ordinary DC. Lifetime Brands brought in Dematic Corp. to engineer, build and install conveying, picking and sortation equipment that would optimize energy usage while maintaining the highest possible uptime reliability.

 

Lifetime Brands is a designer, developer and marketer of kitchenware, cutlery and cutting boards, bakeware, cookware, pantryware, tabletop, home decor, picture frames and bath accessories. The company markets its products under some of the industry's best known brands, including KitchenAid, Farberware, Mikasa, Cuisinart, Calvin Klein and Nautica, as well as environmentally-friendly products such as EcoWorld.

 

Lifetime Brands' products are distributed through almost every major retailer in the United States. In 2007, the Garden City, New York-based company had net sales exceeding $493 million, a 7.9 percent increase over the prior year. This growth has been influenced by the company's vigorous brand acquisitions, which in recent years has included Mikasa, Wallace, Towle, Syratech and Pfaltzgraff brands.

 

The company's newly-upgraded Robbinsville, N.J. DC handles its lines of kitchenware, distributing nationally some 7,600 SKUs of food-prep items like baking products, kitchen gadgets, dinnerware, barware, cutting boards and cutlery sets.

 

The original 550,000 square-foot Robbinsville building was completed and operational in 2001. Pick tower equipment additions were made in 2004, and in 2006 the building was expanded by 150,000 square-feet to accommodate additional conveying and high-speed sortation equipment, another pick tower and additional VNA (Very Narrow Aisle) high-rise pallet racking to accommodate 100,000 pallets. The DC has 4.7 miles of VNA wire-guided aisles. Finally in July 2007, a fifth pick tower was added, a third high-speed sorter and additional conveying equipment.

 

Ninety-five percent of Lifetime Brands' 7,600 SKUs come into the Robbinsville DC by container. The containers are opened and the product is palletized, and then put away into storage or used on current orders using a cross dock operation.A WMS helps direct picking, as well as replenishment of the product, from the stored pallets. Batch waving is utilized through the picking and sortation process. Full-cases make up the majority of products needed for orders. The higher volume items are selected directly onto conveyors in five multi-level pick towers using pick labels. About 20 percent of the DC's product is split-case, manually picked and scanned to carts using RF scanning technology, which are then inducted into the sortation at one of several induction points. Split-case items include kitchen gadgets and food preparation items, which are usually pick-and-pack to a specific store rather than shipping bulk to wholesale. Normally, the DC is shipping to a distribution center in bulk, but split-case items are packed per store then shipped consolidated to a distribution center.

 

The hub of the Robbinsville distribution center, and where the DC realizes much of its most profound efficiencies, is with its sortation and conveying systems, which reduce manual labor.

 

Two Dematic RS Series high-speed sliding shoe sorters are utilized in the DC. The interleaving extruded aluminum slats in the sorters provide a wide, flat carrying surface that prevents jams. It allows the sorting of a wide range of product sizes and types with quiet and positive sortation and ultra-high throughput.

 

Coming into and out of the sorters, the DC is utilizing zero-pressure accumulation conveyors to temporarily stop, hold, and release material. They allow product accumulation along a line without pressure buildup.The DC's energy conservation module, conveyors and sortation is run under Dematic's SortDirector warehouse control system (WCS), which integrates with the Robbinsville WMS and coordinates all product movement inside the distribution center. SortDirector runs on a Windows-based Pentium PC using an SQL database. It uses modular components of code to make it easily configurable. Providing graphic system monitoring for the entire conveying operation, it gives operators real-time control of product movement, and real-time reporting.

 

By mid-year of 2007, Lifetime Brands' Robbinsville, N.J. distribution center had the capability of handling 45,000 cartons per day at an extremely high order accuracy rate.

 

"The energy efficiencies at our New Jersey facility have helped cut our distribution operating costs," says Craig Phillips, senior vice president for Distribution at Lifetime Brands. "We have reduced our distribution expense, as a percentage of sales, by 3.75 percent over the past five years."

 

"Uptime reliability is also critical to running an efficient DC," continues Phillips. "A key operational metric we look at is our system's uptime, and at Robbinsville it is over 99 percent. We also attribute much of our inventory and order accuracy to the systems we have in place."