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The core of the system is a flat sorter, in a large (46 metres long) carousel format, which has been highly modified for the Bertus application. A conveyor carries flat trays, specially designed to carry CDs and DVDs, round the carousel. Each tray carries one item. There are now 322 drop zones, more than enough to accommodate all of Bertus’s existing regular customers. So once the system is loaded, only one sortation run is required each day.

Products are loaded onto the system via a ‘De-Stacker’, from where they travel by an inclined flight conveyor into the trays to the overhead Induction Station on the carousel. The custom-designed De-stacker is a major innovation. Previously CD/DVDs had to be fed one by one into the system. Now the batches of product are simply taken from the ‘pigeon hole trolleys’ and loaded into the De-stacker.The De-stacker can take up to 75 items at once, and can be adjusted to take different types of product – single or double CDs, CDs in plastic or cardboard sleeves, or DVDs.

The machine automatically adjusts according to the thickness of the item.The De-stacker feeds individual items onto the flight conveyor, where they are automatically spaced to synchronise with the orientation of the trays on the carousel. At the Induction Station at the top of the flight conveyor the products’ bar codes are read by an in-line scanner. Bar code labels on CDs and other similar media are notoriously small – so as to interfere as little as possible with the cover design – and can be difficult to read. SDIGreenstone had to fine-tune the scanning process to ensure guaranteed first-time accuracy. Information scanned from the barcodes is fed back into Bertus’s WMS, so it knows which items are in the system, and in which trays. Interrogating the order schedule the WMS then issues signals to the sorter which, by reading the bar code on each CD with in-line scanners installed round the system, releases the required items into the correct, storespecific, drop zones.

The base flaps on the trays carrying the CDs are activated by solenoid trip switches that receive pulses from the WMS to open above the required drop zone.The trays open ‘with the flow’ of the conveyor so the CDs slide out gently (CD cases are rather brittle!) down chutes into the ‘store boxes’, which are mounted on rollers.When the boxes are full they are rolled off, and the items are transferred for consolidation, packaging and despatch. Because of the increased number of drop zones the sorter can now run interrupted, topped-up with consignments loaded into the De-Stacker, until all the store orders have been completed.

The system automatically detects when a store box at a drop zone is full, and will not release any more items into it.When a box is full a light on the drop station illuminates, and the drop zone number flashes up on an LCD display panel above the sorter.

Some Facts and Figures

• Bertus holds up to 1 million titles in stock.
• Store orders can vary from one to thousands of items.
• Bertus is shipping up to 3000 orders a week.
• That can be up to 100,000 individual items.
• The sorter carousel is 46m long, 3.5m wide and 2.2m high.
• The system is currently sorting 30,000 items a day.
• But it has the capacity to sort 50,000.
• The innovative De-Stacker concept has proved so efficient that SDIGreenstone is now producing units for other record manufacturers and distributors.