6,000 product lines through 8 centres worldwide - with subsidiaries in 14 countries selling to millions of consumers in over 120 more. Autostore has cut despatch times by 33% and labour costs by 10%.
ColArt is the world's leading supplier of artists' materials, arguably most famous for its Winsor & Newton and Lefranc & Bourgeois fine colour brands - whose origins date back to the 18th century. Familiar and much loved by artists for their inherent quality and innovation, ColArt's colours have provided the materials of choice for, among others, Romantic landscape painter Joseph Turner - often cited as England's greatest painter - as well as the European Impressionist Movement that includes the timeless genius of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Cézanne.
Today, ColArt is a global business with a turnover of around £129 million, serving professional and amateur artists alike in over 120 countries. ColArt's Winsor & Newton, Lefranc & Bourgeois, Liquitex and Reeves brands dominate the world market, accounting for in excess of a third of all artists' materials sales made. Half the company's sales are in fine art colours and it is always modernising. ColArt has also taken strong international market positions in ancillary products such as brushes, easels and surfaces as well as strong regional positions in colours for the education, craft and hobby markets.
The entire operation is hubbed out of ColArt Group's headquarters in Harrow, London and covers around 6,000 different product lines manufactured both there and in Le Mans, France. All sales are made through a network of subsidiaries in 14 countries. With European warehousing and distribution centres in the UK, France, Sweden, Italy, Holland, German, Spain and US distribution managed out of Piscataway in New Jersey, ColArt's supply chain requires a flexible, integrated, powerful and proven IT infrastructure that guarantees fast and accurate product throughput. ColArt turned to Autostore - developed by leading UK logistics software house Central Systems & Automation - for the solution that would see its world-beating brands into their fourth century.
ColArt brands are sold through thousands of distributors and retailers to millions of consumers. It carries a broad product range to satisfy the varying demands of artists, crafters, hobbyists and children - up to 12,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) may be stocked in any one ColArt company at any given time. It's a discerning market demanding orders serviced at speed and with total reliability, with the maximum possible fulfilment rate.
The business pressures facing ColArt are the multi-faceted sorts recognised by manufacturers everywhere around the world - the need to cut costs year-on-year; limit risk; improve supply chain agility; protect and develop market share; outmanoeuvre the competition; and exploit new markets with innovative new products.
Significant investment driving future growth ...
The result has been a significant programme of over £4 million worth of investment: a high performance, totally automated warehouse carousel system in Harrow; a mini-load mechanical handling system at the New Jersey warehouse; flexible manufacturing systems - plus major IT upgrade projects in the UK, France, the US and China - all alongside major warehouse expansion, relocation or other upgrades in the UK, Italy, Holland, Sweden and China.
Richard Woolard, ColArt's operations director, takes up the story: "Our strategic re-investment programme has been geared to providing the business with a stepping stone for integrated growth across all our markets. The physical systems are one thing - but without the right control and management software behind them, it becomes impossible to sweat the assets and optimise performance for the consistency, efficiency and accuracy we need to maintain and hone a global market-leading position."
With the ultimate disappearance of its legacy warehouse management system supplier, ColArt knew that its UK supply chain hub would become exposed to incremental, long-term inefficiencies and the business to erosion of market share - without a strategic re-appraisal of its core supply chain operations. The company turned to logistics software and integration specialists Central Systems & Automation and its market leading enterprise warehouse management & control system (WMCS) - Autostore.
ColArt's products range from the small and lightweight - such as paintbrushes and individual tubes of paint - through to larger, irregularly shaped products such as artists' pads and easels. For the mission-critical Harrow operation, this meant deploying an advanced and fully automated warehousing system with nine innovative horizontal carousels (HOCAs). Autostore's track record, flexibility, ease-of-use and scalability made it the natural system of choice for Woolard.
Delivering a robust software backbone ...
ColArt opted for several Autostore systems and modules, including the warehouse management & control system, crane control system, HOCA control system, conveyor control system, pick to light, put to light and check weigh modules.
Says Woolard: "It's was a significant software and systems refurbishment and so it was really important that we be able to implement Autostore without disruption to our day-to-day operations - with well proven changeover procedures, the Autostore team switched us over seamlessly."
The WMCS is a multi-user Oracle/UNIX-based client-server architecture supporting up to 12 Windows XP users across a secure, wireless local area network (LAN). Featuring an automated mini load crane and associated conveyor systems (including gauging equipment), Autostore controls the picking from static picking terminals and uses advanced pick-to-light, put-to-light and weigh scale hardware.
Autostore communicates with and controls ColArt's wide range of mechanical handling equipment (MHE) used at Harrow, including a mini-load crane, conveyors, nine HOCAs and several weigh scales. It also integrates seamlessly with ColArt's enterprise business system - MFG/Pro - sharing network drives and high-level management information using Autostore's middleware integration module.
ColArt's HOCA system stores small, lightweight product such as paint, bottles of varnish and paintbrushes and these make up around 80 per cent of the Harrow throughput. The hub receives product either direct from factory production, on-site (delivered into the HOCA system by an automated conveyor), external suppliers or product returned by customers.
The MFG/Pro resource planning system defines the different handling units by which all product is measured - from the smallest packing unit for a product, multiples of units and multiples of packs - and shares this information with Autostore. Zoning is then used to allow the right product distribution and control across the HOCAs and associated buffer racking. Output requests are electronically pre-advised to Autostore by MFG/Pro and orders can also be created locally in Autostore. All order allocation and release is automatic, with allocation happening simultaneously with order creation and release when ColArt's pickers log in.
Autostore controls inputs into the HOCAs via the input conveyor system with all input product meeting pre-set packing criteria: container type, dimensions and weight. Outputs from the HOCAs is done by the multiple wave-picking of packs of units and individual units, controlled and directed from the picking terminals by Autostore. Full trays or products are often needed for orders and Autostore handles these using the mini-load crane and the upper export conveyor.
Operational improvements that drop to ColArt's bottom line ...
The result is a seamlessly integrated, automated warehouse operation that delivers fast response and accurate order management and replenishment. Users in the picking area find the system intuitive and easy to use. It works really well from a management perspective too: the report generator is fast and simple and that means Woolard can get really accurate information on-tap - and that helps the team make better and faster decisions for the business.
Concludes Woolard: "We wanted to make sure that we could turn orders around faster than anyone else. With multiple line factory input and automatic replenishment, we have created a state-of-the-art, automated warehousing operation that future-proofs our business. Autostore has enabled us to cut the time it takes to process and despatch orders by a third - turnaround time is now just four hours and this means we can make the most of our daily delivery schedule with Lynx Express.
"As well as faster throughput and fingertip reporting, Autostore has helped us on the macro level - we've been able to reduce our labour costs by 10 per cent and this is critical to maintaining competitiveness while improving our bottom line performance."