Barbour builds a warehouse of the future

Customer Story

Barbour Books, a Christian publishing company located in Ohio, USA, recently completed construction of its new state-of-the-art warehouse. An ingenious concept of implementing carousels resulted in slow-moving books being picked and shipped out at a dramatically faster rate.

Barbour’s decision to build a new warehouse reflects its exceptional growth since it first began operating in 1981 as a small remainder publisher. Today its front-list releases number more than 150 titles per year coupled with nearly one thousand stock titles. In fact, since its inception, Barbour has shipped over one hundred million books.

A modern warehouse

Hand in hand with Barbour’s growth is its business concept to reach various markets with “great Christian books by the million” but to continue to do so required a new warehouse that could accommodate more books and that could effect speedier distribution of titles. 

This was firstly achieved in the efficient design of the new warehouse and the innovative use of carousels. There are four pick zones, consisting of two carousel pick zones, one carton flow zone, and one pallet flow zone.

The carousels hold the largest number of SKUs, mainly Barbour’s slower moving SKUs. Carousels hold three to six month’s supply of inventory while the carton and pallet low hold one month’s supply of inventory.

Ambitious distribution targets

The publishing software system Barbour utilizes, IBS Bookmaster, is integral to the efficient running of the warehouse. IBS Bookmaster software, in particular its integrated warehouse management software, automates many daily operations. While Barbour has used IBS Bookmaster since late 2000, recent new enhancements to the system have played a major part in enabling Barbour to reach its ambitious distribution targets.

The developers of IBS Bookmaster, IBS, added a significant amount of functionality for Barbour into its standard version of the publishing-specific ERP system. This included routines to cube orders enabling the system to predict which size carton to use for each order and allowing Barbour to pick directly into the cartons. IBS also designed a standardized interface program to Barbour’s shipping system in order to pass data from pick-to-light to IBS Bookmaster. Because this uses an EDI like interface, IBS Bookmaster customers using other pick-to-light hardware can also use it.

Reduced order processing time

Together with IBS Bookmaster’s assistance and a new warehouse design, the time taken to ship orders has been dramatically reduced. George Kourkounakis, Executive Vice-President-CFO of Barbour Books, comments, “Thanks to IBS Bookmaster, we have reduced the average pick time of an order from 12 minutes to two minutes and we have also reduced our warehouse labor requirements.”

“Our efficiency was severely limited with our old setup. Picking books took too long with pickers pushing a cart with four bins and usually only picking four orders at a time, depending on the size. To pick the orders, pickers were traveling approximately 250 feet. After the orders were picked, the bins were given to our packers to pack the orders and two other people handled this,” explains Kourkounakis.

Huge savings in time and resources

He goes on to state that, “Now, IBS Bookmaster cubes the order and one person can pick the order directly to a box. This means books are only handled once, resulting in a significant saving of time and resources. What’s outstanding is that Barbour can now pick eight cartons at one time. As well as that, we no longer require paperwork when picking orders thanks to the installation of the pick-to-light system.”

When the order is ready to ship, Barbour completes a quality control check of each order comparing the actual weight to the expected weight (based on the weight of each book stored in IBS Bookmaster software). Consequently Barbour can now catch picking errors before they are shipped, helping to eliminate shipping errors.

Barbour is now shipping 90 percent of orders within 24 hours of receipt of the order and shipping the other 10 percent within 48 hours.

With a great new warehouse design and IBS Bookmaster helping to move orders out of the door, Barbour’s motto to serve customers with ‘top-quality, high demand, value-priced products’ will stay constant well into the future.

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