Honeywell Gives Dick’s a Competitive Edge
Dick’s Sporting Goods expanded its Plainfield, Indiana facility from 360,000 square feet to 725,000 square feet. Honeywell developed an implementation plan with minor tie-ins performed at strategic times. The outcome resulted in a brand-new conveyor system in an expanded building with no interruptions to existing operations.
History
Dick’s Sporting Goods was founded by its namesake Dick Stack when he was just 18 years old in 1948. Stack worked at an Army/Navy store in Binghamton, New York, when his idea of expanding its product line to include fishing supplies was mocked by the owner. Relating his disappointment to his family that night, his grandmother decided to give him her life’s savings and instructed him to “follow his dreams” with it. Stack opened the first Dick’s as a “bait & tackle” fishing supply store that same year and expanded into general sports merchandise in the late 1950s.
In the early 1990s, Dick’s Sporting Goods began chain operations, opening additional stores across upstate New York, before moving its headquarters to Pittsburgh in 1994. In 2004, the company acquired 48 locations from Galyan’s Trading Company, another sporting goods store. In 2007, they acquired Golf Galaxy which operated 65 golf superstores. Through its 340 store locations and a growing internet order business, Dick’s provides authentic full-line sporting goods with a broad assortment of brand name sporting goods equipment, apparel and footwear in a specialty-store environment.
The Facility
To accommodate the requirements of the facility and system, Dick’s Sporting Goods expanded its Plainfield, Indiana facility from 360,000 square feet to 725,000 square feet. The system consists of receiving, backstock, semi- bulk, quality audit, ticketing, open-to-hang, active, singles picking, return to vendor, claims, breakpack, store consolidation and shipping.
Honeywell Intelligrated developed an implementation plan with minor tie-ins performed at strategic times. Dick’s Sporting Goods continued to use the existing system until new areas of the system were ready for tie-in. The outcome resulted in a brand-new conveyor system in an expanded building with no interruptions to existing operations.
The System
The key components of the system include a high-speed IntelliSort sliding shoe sorter in the receiving and shipping areas. The breakpack sorter is a dual-sided high speed IntelliSort shoe sorter. A high-speed IntelliMerge® is located in the receiving area and the shipping area. The merges and single- sided sorters are capable of running 630 feet per minute and are designed to sustain a throughput rate of 180 cartons per minute based on a 24-inch average length case.
The dual sided IntelliSort shoe sorter is capable of running 550 feet per minute and is designed to sustain a throughput rate of 100 cartons per minute.
The system is controlled via Honeywell Intelligrated’s InControlWare® software that communicates with the Warehouse Management System (WMS), which is located at Dick’s Sporting Goods corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania. A support center lets corporate trouble shoot system problems. ViewCenter, a 3-D graphical representation of the system, provides ease of monitoring the system in real time.
Receiving consists of 18 uptake lines for conveying cases from trucks located at the receiving dock. These 18 lines merge into three takeaway lines that feed the receiving IntelliMerge merge lines. Also merging at this location is the re-circulation line from the receiving sorter and a line from backstock. The receiving IntelliSort sliding shoe sorter has six divert locations. The diverts include three cross-dock lines, one no-read/jackpot line, one breakpack line, and one ticketing location.
Cases destined for the cross-dock lines are transported directly to the shipping IntelliMerge merge lines. The breakpack line conveys product to the dual-sided IntelliSort shoe sorter for delivery to the put-to-store locations. Cases destined for ticketing are transported to the mezzanine level located directly above the breakpack area. No-read or jackpot cases are conveyed to a floor location near the first receiving uptake line.
The breakpack area has 12 modules consisting of a combination of gravity and powered conveyors with shelving locations for store cartons. Operators put merchandise into store cartons via RF. Finished store cartons are pushed onto a powered takeaway conveyor and transported to the carton seal area. Empty cartons are placed onto an empty corrugate conveyor for transport to the trash baler.
The ticketing area has banks of gravity roller conveyor feeding workstations where the quality audit, ticketing, or open-to-hang operation is performed. Cartons are manually pushed down active lanes to the operators. Finished cases are placed onto a powered takeaway conveyor for transport back to the receiving sorter and onto the next processing destination.
Full, open cartons that are destined for shipping first travel to the carton seal location. The carton seal area has an Intellisort pop up wheel sorter for round-robin sorting to any of the five carton seal lines. Outbound sealed cases travel to the shipping IntelliMerge merge lines.
Shipping at Dick’s Sporting Goods Plainfield, Indiana facility is via palletized loads. The IntelliSort shoe sorter shipping sorter has 33 aftersort diverts. The diverts are clustered into eight banks of four divert lines. The last divert on the sorter is for backstock and also serves as the no-read divert. Diverted cases travel off the sorter to gravity run out lanes where the cases are scanned by the operators and placed onto the appropriate store pallet.
Cartons that are not successfully diverted travel to the re-circulation line located at the end of the sorter. Full pallets are transported via forklift trucks or pallet jacks to stretch-wrap machines. The pallets are wrapped and staged in the bulk storage area and are now ready for shipment to the store.
