Haba distributes its products from Bad Rodach under the Haba, Qiero!, Fitz and Jako-O brands. The automated hanging system on roller adapters stores and sorts hanging and flat-packed goods as well as flat-packed items and cartons in a single system. Items are loaded into the pockets and emptied automatically. This makes the system suitable for fully automated order processing for pure e-commerce and omni-channel retail. At Haba, the bag sorter on two floors forms the link between the incoming goods and shipping departments. There is space for up to 40,000 products in a total of 18 buffer loops, in which the bags circulate and wait for new order allocations. With the Dematic solution, returned goods are ready for sale again in the shortest possible time.

The previous returns management system was no longer up to the demands of modern e-commerce. The pocket sorting system shortens the access times for returned items, making them available for shipping again as quickly as possible. The company from Bad Rodach attached particular importance to the fact that the new technology could be seamlessly integrated into the existing system. Dematic therefore used the previously unused air space in the distribution center for the installation.

The pockets are suspended on rollers and run in an overhead rail to save space. Thanks to its modular design and variable chain length, the pocket sorter can be installed compactly in almost any application environment. A wide variety of product shapes and sizes weighing up to three kilograms can be stored in the pockets. The individual pockets can be identified by RFID tag and barcode. Once the returns have been processed, the bags are automatically loaded on the first floor. The system then transports the bags to the second floor via an inclined conveyor. There they circulate in a dynamic buffer, which can temporarily store around 40,000 products on 18 conveyor loops, each 128 meters long. When an order is assigned, the sorter transports the requested goods to the bag collector, which assigns them to their respective batch using batch picking on 17 parallel bars. At the repacking stations, the entire batch is consolidated with the goods from the manual warehouse. To do this, the system automatically unloads the bags at the predefined points and, after closing them, transports them via a second conveyor shaft back to the empty bag section on the first floor, where they await their next use. In this way, the bag sorter retrieves up to 750 items per hour and workstation. pb