Bleckmann boosts warehouse efficiency with Oracle Cloud
Using an app it built in Oracle APEX, along with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the Belgian-Dutch logistics provider improved the speed and accuracy of garment labeling.
“Thanks to the flexibility of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we are able to continuously improve the productivity and quality of our logistics processes.”
Business challenges
Bleckmann, based in Belgium, specializes in end-to-end logistics services for fashion and lifestyle brands, providing everything from warehousing to multimodal transport. Order delivery and returns account for 40% of its business. More than 4,000 company employees are engaged in processing customer orders, fulfilled from warehouses in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America.
In the fast-moving fashion business, flexibility and speed are key to competitive advantage. Bleckmann needed to boost the efficiency of its price tagging for key customers, so that the garments would arrive faster and error-free to their stores worldwide.
Price labels used to be printed in advance, with no direct link to the garments in each warehouse. This resulted in manual errors, ultimately leading to the wrong prices and currencies on garments in stores.
Bleckmann’s old on-premises system caused unacceptable logistical bottlenecks. To bolster SLAs with one of its key customers, the company sought a cloud-based solution that would eliminate garment-labeling errors and accelerate order delivery.
We are able to process more units per hour and have markedly reduced room for error, which is highly significant when printing 9 million tags per year in just Belgium alone.
Why Bleckmann Chose Oracle
Bleckmann selected the Oracle Application Express (APEX) low-code development platform to create a labeling application on top of its warehouse management system, which runs on Oracle Database Cloud Service, for scanning items and automatically generating correct prices and currency labels. It also chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to store the label data and send it to the customer’s warehouse for label printing.
Bleckmann chose Oracle APEX because of its proven track record in quickly building scalable, secure enterprise applications. It selected OCI because of its high performance, high availability, and ability to scale for additional distribution centers over time.
“With the flexibility of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment and with Oracle APEX, we are able to continuously work on improvements in productivity, quality, and process efficiency,” says Sebastien Verhoeven, Bleckmann IT application manager.
Results
Deploying the label application in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Bleckmann boosted productivity and labeling quality. By scanning a garment from a picked box, the price tag for that item is automatically printed in the correct currency at the customer’s warehouses in Belgium, the UK, and US.
Bleckmann now ships about 90% of all orders on the same day, whereas before, large orders could take two to three days to process.
The Oracle implementation enabled Bleckmann to substantially reduce garment-labeling errors for a key customer and replenish its stores faster. Planned logistics enhancements include monitoring and reporting on the labeling productivity of warehouse pickers and packers.
Partners
Bleckmann collaborated with Bryxx on the implementation of the new Oracle solution. With the flexibility of the environment and use of Oracle APEX, Bleckmann was able to continuously work on improving productivity and quality.