Xacus is an historic producer of men’s and women’s shirts of San Vito di Leguzzano (Vicenza, Italy), which inaugurated its e-commerce sector about four years ago.
Since 1956, when visionary shirt-maker Alberto Xoccato founded the firm, Xacus has grown to become a partner of some of Italy’s top names.
The company began to export, first concentrating on North America and then extending its radius of action to include the world’s other main markets, with production plants in Italy and Albania.
Over the years, Xacus has completely renewed its production and logistics organisation and has opened more than 50 corners and “shops in shops” in the stores of leading Italian and foreign customers.
What does the acronym Xacus stand for?
X stands for Xoccato, the family’s surname. A for Alberto, the founder. C stands for “Camiceria” (shirts in Italian) and U for Uomo (men’s), since initially the business only produced shirts for men. S is the initial of San Vito di Leguzzano.
How was the manual warehouse organized before the arrival of Modula?
Whereas before it took 6/7 minutes to complete an order, because operators had to find every code along the aisles of the warehouse, searching through sizes, codes and colours by hand, now, with Modula, it only takes 3.
Before, every order took the form of a printed list of codes, which were picked by hand by a worker, who often walked the same stretch of warehouse aisle dozens of times within a few hours. It was impossible to optimise worker movements because the underlying concept was “man to goods” and only one order was processed at a time.
After manual picking (product by product, shelf by shelf) the product was packaged and prepared.
Every order consisted of a picking list, with items collected one by one.
Automate the picking of semi-finished products with Modula vertical warehouses
Since the arrival of Modula, in 2016 the workflow has changed completely, becoming a much “leaner” process. The orders processed can be fulfilled in multiple or single mode. The worker who receives the order via email or the ERP system simply confirms the order code when it appears on the touchscreen interface of the Copilot (a user-friendly console allowing access to all the machine’s functions).
The operation launched on the WMS warehouse immediately activates the two Modula, which began to move the trays around to deliver the goods to the bay for picking: not just one warehouse prepares to act but both, to cut waiting times and enable the operator to pick from either Modula almost simultaneously.
The trays are ready with the goods and the order is opened immediately by just scanning the barcode.
The Modula revolution involves not only the optimisation of warehouse spaces (now reduced to floor space of 20 square metres, with a height of about 9 metres), but also the capability to process several orders at once, with no mistakes.
This is possible thanks to Put to Light. With this aid, the same number of collection locations as there are orders to be completed simultaneously are set up. The Modula WMS software associates a specific order to each location. It is the job of Put to Light to guide the worker during order collection.
Each location has a display with two colours (red and green) each of which corresponds to a specific Modula machine, from which the worker will collect the goods. The display shows the quantity of pieces to be collected.
The order will not be considered completed until confirmed with the “free” button.