Logismarket, the Industrial Directory.

The 25,000m² Lymedale DC, dedicated to ASDA’s highly successful George clothing brand, the UK’s fastest-growing retailer, currently has the capacity to hold more than 1.8 million garments. SDIGreenstone has installed systems to handle both flat (boxed) and hanging items enabling ASDA to undertake more than 1.4 million order-picks per week.A large part of the installation uses radio frequency identity (RFID) tagging, interfacing with bespoke process control software, to manage inventory storage and direct order picking. The recently-completed installation comprises a fourstorey mezzanine to hold flat boxed items, a ground-level central receiving and despatch area, and a three-tier, nine metre high, zone for hanging garments.

Flat Boxed Items
Incoming boxed items are transferred from delivery vehicles by flexi-conveyors and placed on pallets in the ground floor receiving area. SDIGreenstone has incorporated two two-tonne capacity lifts into the four-storey mezzanine, by which the pallet-loads of boxed items are taken to the required floor. Goods are stored in flow racking, four high, four deep, providing around 60,000 locations, with picking faces for 20,000 SKUs. Orders are either retrieved as full boxes or picked individually from the racks into totes, and transferred back down to the despatch marshalling zone.The boxes and totes are palletised for delivery to George outlets throughout the country.The flat-goods section of the DC is currently handling about 50,000 cartons of product per week – which is more than a million individual items.

Hanging Garments
Incoming hanging goods are removed from delivery vehicles on boom rails and transferred to the receiving area, which has a 30-row buffer zone of static hanging rails.The items, grouped by SKU, are then manually transferred onto SDIGreenstone’s custom-designed flight-bar hangers, known as ‘jets’. Each one-metre long jet is capable of holding up to 40 items. Incorporated into the end bracket of each jet is an RFID tag.The jets are manually moved along rails to an induct point adjacent to the receiving area, where information is written to the RFID tag, via a PC, to allocate a storage location to the jet.