Two picking options for home décor items in the logistics centre of Côté Table in France

About Côté Table

Côté Table was founded in 1996 in Burdeos (France) and focuses on the design and sale of an extensive range of home décor items. Its catalogue includes textiles, lamps, crystalware, silverware, cutlery, furniture and decorative items.

The business has a team of designers tasked with developing new creations for each season. In the last few years, it has expanded internationally and its collections are available in close to 2,000 distribution centres worldwide.

The logistics centre

Sectored into two separate zones, products are deposited in each according to their features and turnover. Proper organisation of the goods has allowed the company to streamline warehousing tasks and boost the throughput of the installation.

Mecalux has equipped both sectors with pallet racks, providing direct access to the goods. These incorporate components and accessories that make it possible to house a wide variety of SKUs with distinct size and volume.

One of the sectors has narrow aisles. Consequently, these operate by turret trucks. When carrying out picking, high-reaching order pickers are used.

In the other warehouse sector, picking is done on the three lowest racking levels, set up with live channels. Pallets with reserve products are housed on upper levels.

A broad consolidation, reception and dispatch area was enabled in front of the loading docks. There orders are verified, grouped on pallets and, subsequently, classified and prepared for their pending dispatch.

Racks with narrow aisles

This warehouse sector contains eight 1.9 m wide aisles with pallet racks on both sides. Operators handle the pallets utilising trilateral forklifts.

These machines are principally tasked with the insertion and extraction of pallets from their corresponding locations and operate exclusively inside the aisles. To streamline work, other operators bring or take away the merchandise from the aisle ends.

The trilateral equipment run via guide wires inside the aisles, so that they travel safely, and thus prevent accidental damage to the rack structures. A wire embedded into the floor produces a magnetic field that guides the vehicle.

High-reaching order picking machines are employed for picking. The operator sits in a cabin that lifts alongside the load and, from there, collects the items for each order directly from the shelves.

Racks with live channels

The other warehouse sector also includes pallets racks, with nine working aisles in this case. Operators use reach trucks to perform storage tasks and ground-level order pickers to pick from lower rack levels.

Bottom levels are arranged with live channels where they deposit boxes with consumer products. These shelves consist of roller tracks and are slightly inclined, so boxes slide via gravity. Picking involves collecting items from the front row box.

Live storage shelves hold a part of the reserve boxes and the remainder of the products are stored on pallets on levels overhead. Push replenishment, in this instance, is done in the same picking aisle, by inserting one box after another.

Operators criss-cross the aisles with a hand-held terminal and the warehouse management software indicates which items must be collected.

The warehouse was designed to fulfil the needs of Côté Table. For this reason, beside the dispatch area, there is a zone set aside for forklift battery charging.

Advantages for Côté Table

• Streamlined picking system: the rack distribution and the use of certain equipment make for dynamic order picking.
• Direct access to goods: pallet racking offers direct access to the deposited SKUs, which facilitates stock management and picking tasks.
• Huge capacity: the installation holds 19,628 pallets of different SKUs, sizes and turnovers.