Vera Bradley’s Investment in FORTE’s Smart Warehouse Suite Pays For Itself in Less Than 2 Years

The Challenge
Vera Bradley remains one of the fastest-growing brands in the retail industry, with continued demand for their fashionable and colorful handbags, accessories, luggage, and paper and gift items that appeal to women of every age.

Their growing array of SKUs is sold through thousands of independent and company-owned stores, as well as through a robust e-commerce business. To handle Vera Bradley’s growth, FORTE originally designed a highly automated, 200,000 sq. ft. distribution center and integrated a Warehouse Management System (WMS) with material handling automation utilizing FORTE’s Smart Warehouse Suite™ software.

At the heart of the system is FORTE’s Integration Director™, a real-time, multi-directional middleware that allows any number of systems to communicate and interface in real time, as well as Automation Director®, one of the industry’s most proven and reliable warehouse control system (WCS) software packages for conveyor and sortation control.

The strategic plan developed for the distribution operation anticipated Vera Bradley’s rapid growth and planned for a flexible, scalable approach to facility expansion over a multi-year period.

The high performance of the distribution operation as originally designed and implemented by FORTE, coupled with the phased approach to expansion identified in the strategic plan, prepared the company for its successful initial public offering (IPO) in 2009. The facility expansion that is now underway is a result of the rapid SKU growth and dramatic increase in e-commerce business.

The Solution
The 190,000 sq. ft. facility expansion will make room for additional reserve storage, automated picking and additional shipping capacity.

An innovative new put-to-light order sort/pack area for e-commerce will greatly improve packing capacity, efficiency and productivity. Additional shipping sort lanes for fluid loading and pack and hold, a secondary sorter for LTL shipments with surrounding pallet build area and a separate e-commerce shipping sorter are also part of the expansion.

A new mezzanine structure over the e-commerce expansion will be the new home for the value-added service processing area, with intelligent conveyance for cases and totes utilizing FORTE’s Automation Director.

The newest addition to FORTE’s Smart Warehouse Suite, Simulation Director™ was deployed prior to implementation to help Vera Bradley accurately forecast system performance by creating “real” conditions that strained every element of the automated warehouse — from conveyor systems to system data flows to WCS integration.

Simulation Director reveals the true capacity of a distribution system, taking into account both hardware and software constraints.

The Result

• Order fulfillment was reduced from two days to only 10 minutes.
• Picking accuracy improved from 89% to 99.5%.
• Labor productivity increased by 25%.
• Training time for seasonal help has been dramatically reduced.
• Peak order processing increased from 1,500 to 3,000 orders per day.
• During peak seasonal periods, 140,000 items per day are shipped.
• Visibility of in-process order status is available at the item level.

The real beauty is that the overall systems investment paid for itself in less than two years.

“In typical fashion, FORTE continues to provide significant value to Vera Bradley with the concepts, designs, and numerous controls and software enhancements provided over the years in support of our growing business.” Senior Director, Distribution