Through the warehouse in five minutes

As each Görtz store has been allocated a certain amount of stock in advance, inventory management runs automatically. The shoe store ships over six million pairs of shoes a year from its warehouse in Hamburg Norderstedt. If the Görtz employees on site worked around the clock, they would have to assemble and dispatch the equivalent of more than ten pairs of shoes per minute. "Fortunately, this is not necessary at all, because we do it fully automatically," explains Dennis Schumacher, Head of Logistics at Ludwig Görtz GmbH. "Some items arrive at goods-in, pass through the scanning and labeling stations and reach goods-out in just five minutes - ready for onward dispatch!"

Store, repack first or send on immediately?

The cartons are scanned at several points and automatically routed through the warehouse. Photos: Bluhm Systems

To make this work, Schuhhaus Görtz sends its suppliers an individual template for a logistics label for each order, which must be prominently attached to the respective shipping carton. As soon as a box arrives at the Görtz logistics center, it is scanned. The ERP system immediately knows which supplier has delivered which items. Within fractions of a second, the IT system determines whether the items are to be stored, repacked or sent on immediately. This information is encoded in a barcode and sent to a Legi-Air 4050 label printer. The print dispenser prints out a label with the relevant barcode and uses it to label the passing carton. All cartons labeled in this way are scanned at several points and automatically routed through the warehouse. Packaging units that can be sent on immediately therefore reach the outgoing goods department within a few minutes. Here they are awaited by a second label printer, which applies the correct shipping label.

Intra says: Paradise

When the graphic designer finished this double-page spread, my interest was piqued, professionally of course. After all, the labels on a product play a central role and Bluhm Systeme has developed a great solution with the Legi-Air 4050. The fact that this will help one of my favorite hunting grounds for shoes to respond even faster to my wishes (always strictly according to the motto: "How am I supposed to know what I want if I don't even know what's available yet?") is nothing but a side effect. Believe me!

Legi-Air 4050 label dispensers have a modular design and can therefore be adapted to the respective production environment. At Görtz, for example, they were installed in a horizontal position in order to label the cartons from the side. The applicator - the actual dispensing unit - was equipped with an extension stroke of 250 millimetres. It applies the labels to the cartons without contact using the so-called TampBlow process. As the extension strokes can be up to 1,140 millimetres long, they can even overcome the widest conveying distances.

Labeling "without limits"

In order to label the cartons from the side, the label dispensers were mounted in a horizontal position.

Legi-Air 4050 label dispensers can be adapted to a wide variety of applications: If, for example, labels are to be applied to both the front and back of packaging, 90-degree swivel applicators are used. They pick up the pre-printed labels one after the other and apply them to the desired cardboard sides in a rotational movement. Other, so-called twin-tamp swivel applicators are able to apply labels to the front and top of passing products without having to stop them. In addition, labels can even be dispensed onto the inside of tubes or rolls or optionally placed "around the corner" in variable length ratios if information needs to be read from two sides, for example.

At Görtz, the label printing dispensers apply a barcode and a shipping label on one side. "Our warehouse in Hamburg holds 400,000 pairs of shoes and supplies almost 100 cities in Germany and Austria," explains Dennis Schumacher. This success story began in 1875, when Johann Ludwig Görtz and his wife Catharina Christiana opened the first "quality shoe store" in Hamburg Barmbeck on 14 square meters. Since then, shoes have changed their lives. Just like Cinderella!

www.goertz.dewww.bluhmsysteme.com