The Scranton Times-Tribune featured VARGO®s omnichannel solution for American Eagle Outfitter at their Humboldt Industrial Park distribution center in July. Read the full article.
American Eagle’s Hazleton warehouse breaking tech boundaries
JIM DINO, STAFF WRITER
HAZLE TWP. — A new system in place at the American Eagle Outfitter distribution center in the Humboldt Industrial Park will allow workers to simultaneously pull orders for online customers and retail store stock-replenishment.
And it might just be the first in the world to do that.
The system will allow the warehouse to expand its reach and will mean hiring an additional 125 people, said Christine Miller, director of operations at the distribution center.
The Humboldt Industrial Park facility is 1 million square feet — the largest structure in the Hazleton area — and still has room to grow on 120 acres. Last year, Ms. Miller said the local center would employ as many as 600 during busy seasons.
Vargo, a material handling company located in Columbus, Ohio, went live with its Continuous Order Fulfillment Engine warehouse execution software system on June 15 at the Humboldt facility.
“What is really different here is that the people doing the picking do not know whether each pick is for a direct-to-consumer order or for store replenishment,” said Carlos Ysasi, vice president of integrated systems for VARGO. “In this distribution center, there is no difference, just one inventory with a seamless transition.”
As soon as the inventory is inside the distribution center, Mr. Ysasi said the software system knows where that inventory is located, where the workers are within the building and “it is making real-time decisions to move people and drive the processes.”
It is the only all-waveless omnichannel fulfillment operation in the world that Art Eldred, a client executive for systems engineering at Vargo, is aware of.
The ever-growing e-commerce business drove American Eagle to this point. The 2014 holiday season saw Americans spending $100 billion shopping online, and nearly $300 billion for all of 2014, according to the U.S. e-commerce forecast by Forrester Research.
“We needed the infrastructure to support that growth,” David Repp, vice president of North American distribution at American Eagle told DC Velocity magazine in January.