Spring 2007

Seen above is an impressive new sortation system installed by HMV to speed the despatch of music CDs and DVDs from its facility in Guernsey. It is used for fulfilment of orders placed through the company's online store, hmv.co.uk.

The system was designed and installed by systems integrator SDI Greenstone, and has a capacity of 6,000 units an hour. It is said to be handling 40,000 items a day already - a figure that is set to rise significantly this year.

It delivers items bagged by postcode for collection by Guernsey Post Office. It is made up of four packing machines with an SDI Greenstone 120-dropstation sorter and an induction conveyor system. Also included in the system is a double-tray 'bomb-bay' sorter with specially constructed chutes to accommodate Guernsey Post Office mailbags.

Packaged merchandise - DVDs and CDs - is fed directly from automated packing machines commissioned by Jacob White, Packrobat and ALS, which also apply customer address labels to a predetermined position on each package.

The installation incorporates a specially designed diverter to allow packages to be sent to an inner or outer circle of sorter trays so the packaged products can be dropped to either position. This enables operatives to work on the inside or the outside of the sorter, removing full mailbags from the dropstations and replacing them with empty bags as necessary.

HMV's old package and despatch operation was extremely labour-intensive. Products were hand-picked and manually packaged and labelled before being manually handled again as operatives sorted them by postcode and then placed them in mailbags.

'The brief that we gave the SDI Greenstone designers was to devise a process which eliminated manual product handling,' says Gideon Lask, HMV's e-commerce director. 'This is exactly what we now have.'