Adidas Automates Stock And Distribution System

In business, as in sport, speed can be a crucial factor. Especially when you have 3,000 customers in the high-pressure retail market demanding 24-hour turnaround on orders for your range of footwear, textiles and accessories - a range comprising some 1,000 different items.

Turnaround time was one of the key factors in Adidas UK’s decision to automate its stock and distribution system to a very refined level. Because of its flexibility and hardware independence, a SCO UNIX multi-user system was chosen. That solved the transaction processing, dispatch notes and subsequent invoicing. But it still left the “small” matter of matching the right goods to the right dispatch notes and producing the shipping labels.

Perle SX Serial Cards provided a surprisingly simple solution. In-house, Adidas UK designed an innovative bar code read-and-label system that ran on the SCO host server. On each warehouse packing bench sat up to eight barcode readers and thermal transfer printers with serial COM ports. The Perle SX Serial Card was installed into the SCO host server and 8 port RS-232 connector boxes were placed at each warehouse packing bench. The barcode readers are used to scan picked product details. That information is then automatically transferred through the RS-232 connector box and SX Serial Card to the barcode read-and-label system that runs on the SCO host server. The application compares the picked product details with dispatch orders held on the SCO host server. When a match is found, the application transmits data back through the SX Serial Card and RS-232 connector box to print a shipping label on the thermal transfer printers.

Thanks to Perle connectivity, sports and leisurewear bearing the world-famous Adidas trefoil is processed and shipped to UK distributors and retail outlets within a new record time of 24 hours.

Adidas read-and-label software. Barcode readers match stock numbers to orders and shipping labels are printed automatically.