Boscov’s Ranked Among Top 500 Internet Retailers
by Internet Retailer Magazine

Each year since its launch in 1999, web sales for Boscov’s Department Store have steadily increased; with growth of 22.3% in 2007 alone. The web helps Boscov’s, a regional department store chain located in six Mid-Atlantic states develop its national presence.  With forty-nine stores in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, 50% of internet sales are made from outside Boscov’s market areas.

Boscov’s online store provides customers with the same great selection, value, and service that have made the brick and mortar locations successful since 1911. The site offers many features including color swatches, keyword search, registry, store locator, a blog, online gift certificates, online circulars, frequently asked questions, outlet center, coupons, rebates and more!




How Boscov's breaks bottlenecks

High speed sortation and additional dock doors help this retailer deal with a good problem to have: continuing growth.
By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 6/1/2008

Modern first visited Boscov's 395,000 square foot Reading, Pa., distribution center in 2004. Back then, Boscov's faced a bottleneck in distribution: Due to materials handling process limitations, Boscov's could receive almost twice as many cartons per hour as it could ship out. That not only slowed the delivery of product to stores, it required Boscov's to devote valuable space to staging, which restricted the chain's ability to grow its business without a significant investment in more warehouse space.

Boscov warehouse
The solution: Instead of adding space, Boscov's added automation, including a three-divert sliding shoe pre-sorter, the splitting of an existing pop-up shipping sorter into two units, and new scanning and control systems.

“On paper, the improvements may seem rather minor,” Modern wrote at the time. “But the dividends of the project have already been dramatic in just the first few months since its completion.” Those dividends included:

•a nearly 10% reduction in distribution costs,
•a 25% increase in throughput (200,000 cartons per week compared to 150,000) with no addition to headcount, and
* the capability to crossdock the vast majority of product in record time. “Our shipments can be in receiving and out the door within 7 minutes,” the retailer told Modern at the time.

Boscov sorterFast-forward a few years, and Boscov's was facing a bottleneck again. “Between 2003 and 2006, we grew the chain 25%, from 40 to 50 stores, including the acquisition of a number of stores from Macy's,” says Bob Goonan, Boscov's director of logistics. “We couldn't add space to our existing distribution center, and we didn't want to build a new facility. So, we needed a way to maximize the flow of product within our existing facility.”

Working with a systems integrator (Blesco, 616-977-3950, www.blesco.com), Goonan and his team came up with a new design that will be implemented in two phases: The first, in place now, added additional sortation capabilities and 18 dock doors to accommodate 58 stores. The second phase, which will be implemented in the next few years, will handle an additional 20 stores, allowing the chain to grow to 78 stores.

Once again, the changes seem simple on paper, but as with the previous makeover, they are already delivering big dividends:

•capacity increased by 25% with no additional headcount,
•cost per unit dropped by 8%,
•the units handled per hour increased by 12%, and
•crossdocked cartons that once took 7 minutes to travel from the receiving dock to the shipping dock now make the journey in just 6 minutes.

“The bottleneck is gone,” says Goonan. “We can now have the capacity to ship out about 25% more cartons per day than we receive during peak periods.”

A growing chain

The Boscov's story is one of growth driving change. For the first 60 years of its history, Boscov's was one store in Reading, Pa. In 1962, the company expanded, building three more stores in the Reading area over the next six years.

Out of town expansion began in August 1972 with the opening of a store in Lebanon, Pa. By 2003, the chain had increased to 40 stores. By 2006, there were 50 stores in Boscov's portfolio.

The chain has prospered as a regional player in an increasingly competitive retail environment by continuing to offer a full line of products—from major appliances and furniture to electronics, clothing and collectibles—and catering to the needs of its customers. “As a regional department store, we understand our customers,” says Goonan. “We rate very high on customer service.”

Boscov warehouse
One key to maintaining those high customer service numbers is the ability to have the right merchandise in the store at the right times, especially around peak periods including the patio season, back-to-school and holidays. “As the supply chain has sped up, goods arrive at the distribution center much closer to the time wBoscov warehouse conveyorhen they're needed in the store,” says Goonan.

With the chain continuing to grow, that became an issue. “We were taking product in our receiving area,” says Goonan. “But because there wasn't a fluid movement of product, we spent more time and effort handling it. That was lowering our units handled per hour and raising our cost per unit.”

With more growth planned for the future, it was time to redesign the existing system again.

Building on success

To meet the demands of the new stores, the system builds on the 2003 project, while allowing for future expansion.

“We decided to work within the existing four walls and to maximize the receiving sorter we installed in 2003,” says Goonan. “We also wanted the ability to handle 78 stores in the future in part by expanding to a second shift.”

The first step was to add 12 dock doors, bringing the total to 58 doors. The second step was to add a second sorter with 17 diverts. Designed to process 135 cases per minute, the sorter manages inbound freight from five receiving doors and sorts outbound cartons to 12 doors. One of the five receiving lanes can also divert cartons to another sorter that manages processing to the other 46 store lanes. The original sorter is now used as a single divert to sort cartons to the new sorter.

There have been other changes as well.

•ASNs and compliance labeling: Boscov's continues to increase the percentage of shipments with advanced shipment notices (ASN) and compliant labeling that enables crossdocking, from 65% of shipments in 2003 to 75% today.
•Palletizing: While containerized freight comes into the facility floor-loaded, Boscov's has aggressively worked to have more freight palletized. “With pallets, we can move a lot of product quickly to a processing table and onto the shipping sorter,” says Goonan.

Put it together, and the new system enables Boscov's to keep its stores stocked with the inventory and products its customers have come to expect. “With these changes, we can now get product into the distribution center at 7:00 in the morning and have it on the floor of the stores the next day,” says Goonan. “Without them, I'm not sure we could compete.”




Boscov’s happy to have helpers

By DAN SOKIL, Staff Writer


MARK C. PSORAS/THE REPORTER Montgomery County Intermediate Unit students Kinjal Patel, right, Rachel Paul, left, and Amanda Gibson, right center, along with Catharine Miller, center, job coach, stock shirts at Boscov’s in the Montgomery Mall.

Since the beginning of the school year, students from the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit have been getting valuable on-the-job experience by helping out at the Boscov’s department store in Montgomery Mall.

But the next time you visit the store, their nine-week work term will be over, and the employees there will be sad to see them go.

“We’ve had three or four different groups come in, and they really help us out a lot,” said store manager Mike Lees.

“We try to give them as many different experiences as we can, so they can get out there and maybe get an apartment, get a job, maybe even come back and we’ll hire them here,” he said.

Recently that experience included making the store’s menswear section ready for Father’s Day shoppers: folding and properly stacking shirts on shelves, arranging and hanging belts on racks, and stuffing packages of T-shirts and underwear into their display boxes.

“With the shirts, sometimes they come in a box and sometimes in packages. We open the box, put them in size order, take the plastic off, and put the sensors in,” said Kinjal Patel, one of the MCIU volunteers.

A member of the MCIU’s Transition Services program, Patel is one of the special needs high school students for which the Intermediate Unit arranges on-the-job vocational training.

On this day, Patel and two of her friends worked a two-hour shift at Boscov’s, folding shirts and ties and hanging belts, with only a little supervision from job coach Catharine Miller and menswear department manager Robert Waraska.

“We’ve had both boys and girls here since the program started, and they’ve all been wonderful, they’ve really been a big help,” Waraska said.

The collaboration between Boscov’s and the MCIU began in September, when the store was contacted by the unit about allowing the students to come in for two-hour work sessions every weekday.

“They come in and work for nine weeks at a site, and basically learn how to be good employees while trying all sorts of different things,” said Miller.

“They can see if they like doing work in clerical, in retail, maybe in the kitchen, and it really helps them to learn all of these skills, being on time, dressing for work, looking customers in the eye, in a community setting,” she said.

As she spoke, students Amanda Gibson and Rachel Paul carried a load of packaged white T-shirts from one end of menswear to another, and checked a display of dress shirts to make sure they were all squared away.

“We have to put them in the box by size order, and they go from small, medium, large, extra large and XXL,” said Paul, placing a stack of packaged T-shirts.

The dress shirt arrangement was a little more complex.

“And these we have to count to see if there are seven in the stack, and put the bottom one with the collar out, and the next one’s in and out, in and out, except the top two face the same way,” said Gibson, stacking the dress shirts in exactly the right sequence.

But it isn’t just the menswear department where the MCIU kids help out. Their assignments are based on wherever Boscov’s managers need them, so they know their way around all three floors of this particular store.

“Up in the women’s department, we put stuff that belongs on the right rack by size and style: skirts, pants and shirts, long-sleeved ones, tank tops, bathing suits, everything,” Patel said.

“And at Christmas they really helped out, filling online orders especially. They’d get an order form in and have to go find the item on the floor, and match the bar codes exactly to make sure it was the right item,” Miller said.

The trio, with other students whose nine-week sessions had ended already, also helped set up an Easter display, folded blankets, towels and carpets, and helped set up a patio furniture display as the weather warmed.

“I’ve been doing this for five years, and it’s really the last step for these kids toward going out and getting employment,” said Miller, the job coach. “The students really blossom, and they’re a big help to everybody here. And they enjoy the work too; I think Kinjal would like to stay here forever.”




Boscov’s Recycling Initiatives 2007

Boscov’s CEO Ken Lakin, announced the benefits of their 2007 recycling initiatives far exceeded company expectations

 Fleet Recycling Initiatives
Over 2.1 million lbs. of wood were recycled through implementation of a pallet recycling program with Nazareth Pallet Company. Damaged pallets that were formerly discarded are now mulched, and Boscov’s is reimbursed for reusable pallets. Additionally Boscov’s conserved 1,300 gallons of fuel formerly required to deliver pallets to a Hamburg disposal facility.

 Corporate Recycling Initiatives
Boscov’s corporate office, stores and warehouse facilities recycled more than 8,600,000 lbs. of cardboard and 294,400 lbs. of office paper in 2007.

 Systems Conversions
Implementation of the new Stock Status Operating System utilizing wireless communication devices to assign and convey cartons to stores will yield a saving of 5,200 lbs. of paper transfer documents and 7,400 lbs. of redundant label stock.

 Coming Attractions
Conveyors will be re-programmed throughout the warehouse to activate only upon carton movement past photo electric eyes. During periods of inactivity, conveyors will stop running, reducing electricity consumption.

 Boscov’s Department Stores the largest full-line, family owned independent department store in the country, operating 49 stores in six (6) states including Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia continues to research additional recycling opportunities and practice corporate responsibility.