According to Happyshops, it is one of the top three online stores for board games in Germany. The company is the mail-order company behind online platforms such as Spiele-Offensive.de, Puzzle-Offensive.de and Perfekte-Bilderrahmen.de. Each individual online store specializes in one segment - such as board games, card games, puzzles or wooden trains. In total, Happyshops offers 23,500 different products and one million customers worldwide. 93 percent of shipments remain within Germany, with the remaining seven percent spread across 66 other countries. Both the large number of destination countries and other relevant framework conditions made it necessary to redesign the intralogistics.

More efficiency needed
One of the strategic goals of Happyshops managing directors Frank Noack and Robert Letsch is to achieve stronger international growth. The increasing demand for products from the Happyshops portfolio as well as the shortage of staff and its impact on shipping quality also highlighted the need for automated intralogistics. AMI Förder- und Lagertechnik was commissioned for this purpose. The requirements: Increased shipping performance and greater efficiency in the entire intralogistics process.

The challenge of a shortage of skilled workers
Another aspect that had to be taken into account during the planning and design phase was the existing shortage of personnel and skilled workers. "Our Merseburg site is located in the middle of the Leipzig, Halle and Bad Hersfeld logistics region. As a result, we can hardly find skilled workers or personnel with lower qualifications who meet the requirements for the activities in the shipping areas," says Frank Noack. Despite intensive training, employees at the packing stations were repeatedly unsure of the correct postage and the right label sticker for each consignment, sometimes taking several minutes to decide. For Sven Jesberg, sales technician at AMI Förder- und Lagertechnik, it quickly became clear "that we could only achieve our goal here with automated intralogistics that takes this particular personnel problem into account, networks the respective subsystems with each other and controls the entire intralogistics system, including all processes, via our Logistics Solutions software."

Picking more efficiently
Equipped with a barcode scanner and an order picking trolley, the employees walk in a route-optimized manner along the aisles of the chaotically managed shelving warehouse, in which a total of around 500,000 items with 23,500 different products are stored on 8,200 shelves, and load their trolley with the items ordered online by customers. In this way, each employee can pick up to 16 shipments. Once the orders are complete, they are transported to packing stations. The employees there take the items, place them in the appropriate box and attach a barcode label to the side, which can then be used to identify the order. Then - and this is also the starting point of the automated process - the open carton is transferred to a conveyor line and transported to a fully automatic sealer. Once it has passed this, the closed parcel passes through a barcode scanner in front of a volumetric scale. This identifies the packed order using the barcode on the box. The package is then measured and weighed. The existing order data is supplemented with the new information required for the rest of the process.

Software stands above the entire process
The now complete data of the corresponding shipping unit is sent to a software module developed by Happyshops. It calculates the cost-optimized carrier for the transport service based on the recipient's place of residence, the dimensions of the shipping carton and the weight of the package. This information is forwarded to the higher-level AMI WLS-4.0 control center software. The carton then passes through the system to the label printing dispenser, where the actual shipping label is created and applied during the throughput process.

With the correct recipient and automatically determined postage, the respective parcel passes over a turntable and transfer unit integrated into the conveyor system and is discharged onto the accumulation route of the corresponding transport service provider. The system informs the respective service provider of the consignments ready for delivery.

To ensure the smooth operation of the automated intralogistics system at Happyshops, all sub-processes - from ordering to shipping - and system elements such as the turntable or postage cost calculation are networked with each other via the AMI WLS-4.0 logistics solution software, which acts as middleware here. In addition to the middleware functions, the control system controls the material flow from the start of the dispatch process and also acts as a protocol translator and data concentrator.