Staples

Summary from their London, Ohio Warehouse

Customers

Direct to consumer; orders are from catalog and internet.

Business

The business is robust and Staples continues to exceed Wall Street’s expectations.

Seasonal Sales

Peak seasons include January through the end of February, back to school, and the Monday after Thanksgiving weekend.

• The beginning of the year is busy for two main reasons:
  • Many of their bigger customers have their new budgets approved and usually order large qty's of office supplies to start the new year.
  • Tax season, they sell a lot or record storage boxes, among other tax preparation, storage items, during this period.
• The Monday after Thanksgiving is usually busy for the Delivery Network because a lot of people shop in the stores on that Friday after Thanksgiving. If the store is out of inventory on a particular item, they place the order with the FC in the delivery network and we pick it on Monday for a Tuesday morning delivery.

We also have a busy period for dated goods, or calendars. If you look on a desk top calendar in the month of November, generally you will see a reminder to order your new desk calendar and a majority of our calendar orders happen in November.

Operations

The majority of items are slotted as cases or in bins, and picked as eaches / units. Items are picked directly to a carton on a conveyor, which, when the order selector has completed, is moved to a take-away conveyor where it is sorted to the correct picking zone. However, if the customer orders enough product, then they will be shipped a full case (if the box is large enough and it is not a high value item, they will not re-box it and ship it in the vendor carton). Once completed, the carton goes to shipping. Most orders are shipped using UPS and USPS (they ship approx 40% of our volume via UPS and 60% courier, either are own or third party). They use zone picking in one form or another in all FC's. Some FC's have pick to light and an associate is assigned a particular area. They also assign zones a little more loosely in their pick and pass FC's where we pick from a ticket. In both instances, the associate will pick the item needed and place it into the carton, which is then placed on the take away conveyor. If the order is complete the box will go to QC, if not complete, it will travel to the next zone for the next pick on the order.

Copyright © John J. BARTHOLDI, III. All Rights Reserved.

This is material to supplement our textbook Warehousing & Distribution Science, which may be found at www.warehouse-science.com.

Last modified: Tue Feb 7 20:54:47 EST 2006