By George!

George clothing is a star of the ASDA business. George Davies' range of clothing, sold exclusively through ASDA stores, is fast becoming one of the UK's Best-known clothing retail brands. ASDA has grown the George clothing business to over £450 million sales, annually. It is now well on the way to the company's target of annual sales exceeding £1 billion.

ASDA's ability to sell the same quality garments at prices 20% lower than the high street, is the key to the success of George. The company has improved the range and increased UK sourcing, to give greater flexibility and shorter lead times. Thousands of quality improvements have also been made, but success is not just about getting the product right. ASDA has recently invested œ28 million in a new, state-of-the-art warehouse just for clothing. This has helped it improve availability, reduce stock levels and improve lead times.

Built on the Brackmills estate in Northampton, the new distribution centre has a semiautomatic storage and retrieval system featuring Redirack racking and six picking cranes. The racking block is around seventy metres long and fifteen metres wide. It has thirty bays in its length, each bay having twenty-seven shelves. It is designed for boxed stock, each aperture can contain seven cartons, giving the system a storage capacity of more than sixty eight-thousand cartons.

The racking rises to just over fifteen metres high. It has five double runs and two single runs. The two single runs have a welded wire mesh cladding on their outside to ensure that all the cartons stay within the storage system. The shelves are on a 600mm pitch and the double runs have a 150mm high central divider to stop boxes getting pushed through the aperture from one side to the other.

Stock moves into and out of the storage system on a two level conveyor system. Stock to be put away arrives on one conveyor and is collected and put away by a crane operator. On the return journey the operator will pick cartons for despatch, and deposit them on the out going conveyor. A computerised warehouse control system allocates storage locations, with bar codes being used to navigate cartons through the handling system.

Alan Austerfield was the project manager responsible for the development of the Brackmills centre. "ASDA has used Redirack extensively before", he explains. "We have found it to be a good, safe and reliable product. This installation had to be done to a tight schedule, and Redirack's installation team performed very well."