Spring 2009

Automated fulfilment on a scale seldom seem so far in the UK – that's the aspiration of docdata Fulfilment, the Dutch-owned company based in Witney, Oxfordshire.

The company doubled its warehousing capacity to 100,000 sq ft last year, and says it is rapidly filling this capacity with new business. 'But that is just the beginning,' says divisional director Jack Heijkans. 'We're already looking for customers with high sales volumes that would suit an automated approach,' he told Fulfilment & e.logistics.

Following the departure early this year of Andy Reedman, co-founder and buyout chairman of Braywood, which docdata acquired in 2007, Heijkans is taking a more active role in the UK company's development. He is supported by operations director John van Heumen, a fellow-Dutchman who is now permanently based in Witney.

In its native Netherlands, where it has been active in fulfilment for ten years, docdata regularly despatches 30,000 to 35,000 orders a day – a figure that can rise to 90,000 during the October to January peak. Among its key customers is BOL, the online bookseller that has a status comparable to Amazon's in the UK.

 

'We've always invested in mechanical handling systems suited to high volumes,' Heijkans says. 'We'd like to see the same kind of setup in the UK.'

He acknowledges that large customers such as BOL are few and far between. 'But the high volume would not have to come from just one customer. If we had ten or twenty compatible customers, that would justify the automation.' A possible key to this, he adds, would be to find a launch customer to kick-start the process.

A major benefit to users, he says, would be the ability to offer competitive fees. This would be helped by docdata's unusual transaction-based pricing model, in which client fees rise and fall with traffic volumes. As Heijkans puts it: 'We participate in a bit of the risk.'

Another attraction would be the ability to offer very late cut-off times. 'In the Netherlands we can offer a 10 pm cut-off for next-day delivery.'

John van Heumen adds: 'This is very different from the world of traditional third-party logistics companies, which think in terms of order sizes and quantities and labour costs. The learning curve they have to go through to take on fulfilment kills off the ability to upscale and downscale readily.'

Another unusual technique used in the warehouse by docdata is dynamic stock location. Instead of allocating fixed areas of racking to specific customers, it allows the computer system to select locations according to space and availability. 'We adapt around the uncertainty of customers,' van Heumen says.

Rather than imposing the Dutch IT system on UK users, docdata is currently using and gradually adapting the Braywood-developed system, which 'works very well.'

Not all handling would be fully automated under the new order. Heijkans talks of a 'bookshelf' system in which product is picked manually in waves.

'The UK home delivery market is five or six times as big as the Netherlands,' Heijkans says. 'The opportunities here are enormous.'