Considering that 93-year-old apparel and home items marketer Blair Corp. didn’t even started binding its catalogs until 1995 (the company started as a loose-sheet mailer), you may not think that it was an operations innovator 20 years ago. But it was.
Starting in 1971, Warren, PA-based Blair began using alpha and numeric “reflective card readers,” recalls Randy Scalise, vice president, merchandise handling, and a 30-year Blair employee. The readers would scan the combination of letters and numbers on each tote and then route the totes through Blair’s order filling and packing departments rather than throughout the entire warehouse. Blair still uses the reflective card readers today, but Scalise says the cataloger plans to make the move to barcode scanners in the near future.
In 1983, Blair was filling about 40,000 orders a day, which required a lot of overtime among employees, says Scalise. In 1987, Blair installed a Kosan Crisplant tilt-tray sorter with a barcode reader. “Once the order got to the shipping department, the sorter sorted packages to various postal and UPS drops,” explains Tom McKeever, senior vice president, operations and administration, and a 21-year Blair veteran. “Drop-shipping deeper into USPS systems saved us a lot of money.”
Blair, which today fills an average of 55,000-60,000 orders a day — 80,000-90,000 a day during peak periods — recently invested $12 million in a new cross-belt order and shipping sorter from Grand Rapids, MI-based service provider Siemans. The sorter, scheduled to go live in May, is capable of sorting 14,000 units an hour and will enable Blair to handle more orders, Scalise says. “On peak days, we will now be equipped to handle more than 100,000 orders.”