Victory in the Warehouse Operations category at The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) Awards for Excellence has secured a hat-trick across the UK’s top logistics awards schemes for an Invar Systems project involving the rollout of Hikrobot AMRs across Superdry’s international DC network.
The project’s third consecutive win follows accolades received at the Supply Chain Excellence Awards in the autumn, where the entry won the highly coveted Technology Supply Chain Excellence category, and victory at The Logistics Awards earlier this month, where the project was awarded the Technology Transformation trophy.
CILT said of the entry: “This really is a fantastic example of teams working together to develop innovative solutions to the benefit of all parties involved”.
Commenting on the latest award win, Tim Wright, Managing Director of Invar Systems said: “We’re delighted to be recognised by CILT for this award. It’s been a great project and we’ve really enjoyed working with Superdry. Thanks to them, and thanks to our internal team for working hard – it’s been a great experience.”
More than 500 guests, delegates and finalists watched the virtual event live on the evening of Wednesday 17th March.
Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, Patron, CILT, delivered a special virtual message to the award winners, CILT members and the profession, thanking them for their incredible work in responding to the unprecedented events of the last year.
The project
A successful pilot project for handling ecommerce returns was conducted in 2018, involving six autonomous Hikrobot carriers at Superdry’s UK distribution centre in Burton-upon-Trent. Following the success of the project, Superdry went on in January 2020 to deploy a further fleet of 20 Hikrobot carriers to handle continental ecommerce returns at its European DC in Belgium.
Last spring, the Burton-upon-Trent site saw the installation of 40 more Hikrobot autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in an expansion of the existing goods-to-person system. The enlarged operation handles the entire picking and put-away of womenswear for retail, ecommerce and wholesale. Over 80,000 sq ft of the warehouse has been set out with 1000 transportable pick-wall modules and the area is equipped with a total of twelve pick-to-light stations.
Menswear will follow later with an estimated requirement for 60 more robots and expectations are for the further deployment of Hikrobot carriers in Belgium and the USA – all part of a phased roll-out of goods-to-person robotics that is set to boost productivity and capacity across Superdry’s international network of multi-channel fulfilment centres.
