VIRTUAL REALITY

As one of the world's largest renters of videos, DVDs and video games, there's no question that Blockbuster Inc. needs its distribution centers to operate as efficiently as possible. After all, with approximately 5,000 stores throughout the United States, the firm rents nearly 1,500 videos a minute - offering a total of 1.25 billion hours of movie entertainment each year.

Blockbuster's 850,000-square-foot DC in McKinney, TX, assembles and ships orders to several thousand retail outlets around the world. However, DVD, VHS and game retail are picked manually. A large workforce in employed to pick through over 100,000 square feet of flow racks and static shelving. Items are placed directly into a shipping container where they travel to an RS200 shipping sorter, and are finally delivered directly to shipping trailers. With thousand of SKUs and the large distance required to travel to different locations, this method is both expensive and inefficient.