cewe | Photo books and calendars for Christmas

CEWE is one of Europe’s leading companies for photo services. With the brand’s well-known products such as the CEWE photo book as well as wall art, calendars, photo prints and a variety of photo gifts, the company offers a wide range of high-quality products.

With about 4,000 employees and the very latest in printing technology, CEWE ensures that billions of photos and millions of CEWE photo books and photo gifts leave the production sites every year, reaching over 20,000 retail partners plus end customers in a total of 21 European countries.

At the CEWE Foundation’s headquarters in Oldenburg, which is also the largest production site, own products are manufactured and, in addition, items from sister companies (14 production sites in total) are delivered, which are sorted and dispatched to the assigned retail partners and end customers.

To be able to handle this process more efficiently, psb implemented a pouch sorter in the outbound goods area, where the articles are first buffered and consolidated. If a customer order contains several items, these may be produced at different times, while others are delivered by a sister company. As soon as all items for an end customer are available in the pouch sorter system, the pouches are withdrawn from the buffer carousel, then sorted and sequenced to a packing station. In this way, each end customer usually only receives one parcel, even though several and, in some cases, different products have been ordered.

The procedure is similar for the assigned retail partners and sister companies, for whom items are also buffered and then packed into a shipping carton.

The volume of orders is particularly high in the run-up to Christmas, as many families are keen to find a photo book with great memories under the Christmas tree. To make this happen, the psb system not only has to be very fast, but also highly available, as CEWE’s advertising promise is »ordered by 18 December and still received in time for Christmas«.