Shimano, a world-leading manufacturer and distributor of high quality cycling and fishing equipment and accessories, has opened Australia's first compact Multishuttle Goods-to-Person (GTP) distribution centre (DC) in Sydney.
The new DC has brought together Shimano's cycling and fishing business under the one roof. The DC is designed to enhance the quality of Shinmano's service offering to customers and help the business benefit from economies of scale and reduce distribution costs.
Matthew Bazzano, Managing Director of Shimano Australia Cycling, said: "When Shimano decided to review its Australian supply chain, it was clear that both businesses would benefit by combining their distribution requirements."
"Bringing together not only our distribution requirements, but also the administration, purchasing, finance, human resources and management functions for both businesses made it financially viable for Shimano to invest in a new state-of-the-art DC," added Colin Tannahill, Managing Director, Shimano Australia Fishing.
Dematic's space-efficient double deep, single inventory storage buffer houses a total of 5,168 totes over 16 levels, with each level serviced by its own Dematic Multishuttle.
The system typically supplies around 600 totes/hour to GTP workstations. When stock is retrieved from the Multishuttle system, it is delivered to the GTP workstations as required for order assembly ensuring very high throughput rates.
"The Multishuttle system gives us a lot of flexibility. Each of the three GTP workstations is dual purpose, which means we can some for picking and others for replenishment, depending on what we need at the time," said Shimano's Logistics Manager, Maea Sio.
"The system was scoped to achieve between 220-350 picks per hour/workstation, but we are often achieving significantly higher throughput rates than that, with some operators achieving more than 600 picks per hour."