an advantage for us,” says Kuntz. “Our investments really paid off during the pandemic and they continue to help us through the peak seasons.” Gap Inc. might double its number of employees during peak holiday seasons but they never have to triple their numbers. “It helps take the strain off our leaders and our frontline employees and provides a great customer experience as well,” Kuntz says. “We’re constantly, at worst case, covering our cost increases to keep our costs at, which in today’s environment is a pretty impressive feat.” INVENTORY INSIGHT Effective e-ful llment relies on precise purchasing to keep costs down. However, the buying and planning side of a business can’t always predict when an item will capture the public’s imagination, causing supplies to run short. Flexibility is the answer and having an inventory management system in place that can scale sudden changes is invaluable. Warehouse management systems such as those offered by consulting rm Alpine Supply Chain Solutions are equipped to handle unexpected variables.
Gap Inc.'s fulfillment center in Fresno, California, is one of 11 across the country that all use the same technology and material handling systems.
“It’s nice having a single playbook that everybody operates from. You get to share a lot of best practices that way.” Technologies deployed at scale across Gap Inc.’s network also include Kindred SORT Robots, Exotec automated returns unit-handling, and auto baggers. Having the foresight to lay in automation early on has helped the company ful ll e-commerce orders cost-effectively. “To have a level of capacity that’s not directly tied to an abundance of labor is
The beauty of the system is that manual touches have been reduced to just one. A worker unloads vendor cartons from a trailer, they pass through a variety of quality check scans, and the cartons are then sorted and stored in a mini-load system based on high- performance cranes that are 36 feet tall. At Gap Inc., the sorting process includes sending cartons to cranes designated at either “online” or “retail” depending on the kinds of orders ultimately ful lled. In late summer 2022 Gap Inc. opened a new 850,000-square-foot distribution center—or what it prefers to call a Customer Experience Center— in Longview, Texas. “We installed 24 aisles of TGW cranes at Longview so we have the ability to store roughly 350,000 cases,” says Kuntz. With the Longview campus up and running, the company expects to be able to process more than 4 million units daily across its network. Gap Inc. has also heavily invested in Bombay Sorters, which they use to start assembling nal orders for customers. There are 11 Gap Inc. ful llment centers in North America—including a recently expanded location in Fishkill, New York—and they all use the same technology. “Our facilities all have identical material handling systems,” Kuntz says.
A newly built 850,000-square-foot fulfillment center in Longview, Texas, enables Gap Inc. to store 350,000 cases and process up to 1 million units per day.
174 Inbound Logistics • January 2023
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