Bol.com officially inaugurated the expansion of its fulfilment centre in Waalwijk on Monday. With the opening of the new connecting building, the site now has 100,000 square metres, a doubling.
Bol.com commissioned the distribution centre in Waalwijk in 2017. Since then, the web giant's sales platform has grown considerably. A large number of entrepreneurs who sell via the platform outsource logistics to bol.com. As a result, expansion is now needed. "A larger ground surface increases the storage capacity for sales partners who have outsourced their logistics to us," says Vincent Weijers, Director of Logistics (Chief Operating Officer/COO) at bol.com. "For our customers, this means that they can rely on bol.com's service for a larger part of the assortment, such as delivery on Sundays and evenings, or within a few hours after ordering at home."
Besides more space, the expansion of the fulfilment centre offers room for innovation. It was built according to the highest BREEAM certification (Outstanding), a method for assessing the sustainability of building projects. The fulfilment centre runs on 100 per cent green energy, generated 13,000 solar panels on the roof and wind turbines next to the building. A shuttle system brings the many hundreds of transport bins of stock items to the right order picker. The energy released when braking the transport bins is also stored and reused.
In order to be able to pack as many customer orders as possible to size, bol.com is commissioning 14 new packing machines in its fulfilment centre expansion. These include 5 multi-packing machines for orders consisting of multiple items and 9 mono-packing machines for single-item orders. With these new packing machines, bol.com can pack almost 10,000 orders per hour. They scan the dimensions of one or more articles and fold a cardboard box around it as precisely as possible. Remarkably, the packing machines can handle almost the entire bol.com assortment of 41 million articles.
