Wayfair’s mission is to deliver perfect orders cost-effectively at scale. Their UK site at Magna Park in Lutterworth (1,068,000 sq ft and 20m high) has been fitted to support this achievement. This location is central to a wide range of fulfilment services for Wayfair’s European business. At Lutterworth, they are fulfilling customer orders from the UK, but also for customers in Ireland, Germany, and Austria. Besides picking stock and providing cross-docking facilities for supplier partners, they also process all customer returns for the UK at Lutterworth.
Wayfair run a self-contained home delivery operation for local postcodes and complete various value-added services for supplier partners at this site, including quality control checking and overpacking for protection and other multi-channel fulfilment solutions.
With 105,000 pallet locations and more than 50,000 other storage locations in their racking, plus 25,000 shelving slots for smaller items and a sortation system that can handle items up to 50kg and 2m long, their purpose-designed warehouse at Lutterworth is well set up to pursue their mission. Ensuring that associates have a great and safe workplace is their other primary consideration, and the site has many features to help us achieve this as well.
At Wayfair’s Lutterworth warehouse, they have deployed two sorters to enable the sortation of outbound orders, which has helped them to despatch more than 60% of orders same day for next-day delivery, including larger items such as sofas, beds, and dining tables.
Not only does the sorter move the vast array of articles onto the delivery trucks, but the technology applied means that the process of ensuring the cartons get to the right truck at the right time is hugely simplified. As a result, it speeds up the whole process and enables Wayfair to get orders to customers faster.
Wayfair have also deployed anti-collision technology on their picking trucks. At 12 tons each, they are large, sophisticated pieces of equipment and an essential addition to their operations to uphold as a priority the safety of employees.
This extract is taken from our brand new DeliveryX Warehousing Report 2023 which is free to download. In the report you’ll find an exclusive interview with UK Warehouse Association (UKWA), CEO, Clare Bottle about the UK’s warehousing landscape, with research illustrated throughout with easy-to-read graphs, figures and charts. As well as more on Wayfair, exploring their sustainability journey, you’ll also find detailed company profiles on Amazon and Ocado.
