Arvato Supply Chain Solutions is expanding its capacity at the Dueren site (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany) for the cosmetics company SEPHORA. The customer has been relocated to a new hall module with 7,000 square meters of floor space and seven warehouse doors. At the heart of the expansion is a new four-level pick tower where goods will be stored and picked. The shelving system contains over 40,000 storage locations for 20,000 articles. “The storage area has been optimally designed for SEPHORA’s rapidly growing online business,” explained Julia Boers, President Consumer Products at Arvato Supply Chain Solutions. “With the new pick tower, we have been able to map large storage volumes into a relatively small space.” The project ran over a swift, six-month period, with investment volume at 3.3 million Euros.
SEPHORA entered a cooperation with Zalando last year. As a result, the products of the beauty brand and its partner companies were available on Zalando’s online platform, resulting in rapid growth in the volume of European SEPHORA e-commerce orders. Arvato stores, picks, and packs for SEPHORA at the Dueren site since 2018, managing distribution to end customers in the German and Austrian markets. In addition to handling incoming and outgoing goods, Arvato also provides additional services such as inventory management, Value-Added Services and returns management. To meet the demands of continuous volume growth more quickly and flexibly, the customer has been moved to a new hall module with a pick tower. The facility has a total of four storage levels which have been fit out with drawers, ensuring an optimal and flexible product separation for the almost 1.3 million articles. Once workers have picked orders, they are transported by elevator to one of two packing lines, where they are then made ready for shipment.
The beauty group also expects continued growth in the future. With that in mind, the new hall has been designed to accommodate growth – there is capacity to prepare and ship up to 50,000 packages daily from this location. Automation of the packaging process is also planned. “Arvato Supply Chain Solutions is a professional provider with in-depth e-commerce expertise, who not only have a highly effective team of people, but also continually keep the end-customer in mind,” says Bjoern Ueberschaer, General Manager Germany at SEPHORA. “Our cooperation is not only successful in the German and Austrian markets, but also in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and Turkey. That is the best prerequisite for expanding our business with Arvato in the future.”
