Mack’s Prairie Wings

The Client

Mack’s Prairie Wings is a family-owned, omnichannel retailer of waterfowl hunting equipment, ammunition, outdoor gear, and clothing. They operate one retail store, co-located in a 104,000 sq. ft. facility with their distribution center.

The Challenge

Due to growing eCommerce order volume and SKU proliferation, Mack’s needed to increase overall operational efficiency, optimize the capacity of their distribution center, and increase fulfillment speed. They were looking for a scalable solution that could meet their current, as well as future, distribution needs while reducing labor requirements.

The Solution

Mack’s partnered with KPI Solutions to re-engineer their entire warehouse design from receiving to shipping. They faced storage and handling challenges from managing over 60,000 SKUs with a very diverse product mix (from 150 lb. deer stands to small jewelry). KPI designed and implemented SKU segmentation into their warehouse allowing them to zone pick for efficiency. Additionally, Mack’s ships regulated, high-value items that require special picking, packing and labeling, so the new system assigns items with compliance regulations to certain pickers.

After reviewing a few technology options for Automated Storage and Retrieval (AS/RS), an AutoStore cube-based system was selected for their eCommerce order fulfillment and each pick products for the retail store.

The KPI Solutions engineering team designed and integrated the high-throughput dense storage AutoStore grid to efficiently manage Mack’s growing order volume, reduce labor reliance, and scalability as needed in the future. RF-SMART’s Warehouse Management System (WMS) connected the KPI Kommand AS module with NetSuite, creating real-time inventory data exchanges.

KPI Solutions integrated the AutoStore AS/RS with 18 R5 robots, 34,000 bins, and 4 ports (for picking and replenishment).

The Value

• Automation has enabled efficient auto-replenishment from their warehouse to the attached store, which has been crucial in allowing faster replenishment, maintaining accurate stock levels, and elevating customer satisfaction. This improvement also allowed their team to keep all inventory secure while maximizing use of available space, helping them avoid a costly warehouse expansion.
• Using the AutoStore AS/RS, Mack’s is now able to fulfill an eCommerce order in hours versus days, without compromising on service quality or delivery.
• Order accuracy has also increased as the warehouse team no longer has hundreds of orders to troubleshoot and correct each day.