Packaging by the Book

Durrenberg supplied a Belgian not-for-profit educational book rental business with packaging machines to smoothly handle its annual peak.

Rent a Book was founded in the Belgian town of Enghien in 2013 by non-profit company Solera as a response to a request from the nearby Collège Saint-Augustin, who wanted to offer a tailor-made solution to its students in terms of rental and sale of textbooks. It has since grown into a sizeable business that now supplies 150 schools. With financial constraints driving more and more educational establishments towards a book rental solution, it has established itself as a reliable partner, offering flexibility, efficiency and quality.

Solera – Rent a Book was set up by Gregory Bastiaens and his wife, who used to run a printing company and was asked several years ago to centralise the sourcing of school books for a school in her neighbourhood. When other schools asked Mrs Bastiaens to provide the same service for them, this activity started as a side business alongside the couple’s existing accounting business. This situation lasted for 10 years before they decided to focus on new and second-hand school book distribution, and so Solera – Rent a Book was established to satisfy a growing demand.

With the business naturally very much concentrated between August and September, and a sales strategy that encourages schools to partner with the company so that books can be delivered grouped for multiple students, an efficient picking and packing process is key to the company’s performance. Furthermore, any hiccoughs in delivery will likely have a significant impact on students as they start their new school year.

Efficient Warehousing

Solera – Rent a Book developed well in the French speaking part of Belgium, and investment in its warehouse operations has been motivated by an extension of the market in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. In the Solera – Rent a Book warehouse, order-pickers launch orders by taking picking tickets from a printer, one ticket per order. They then assign each order to a plastic tote, load the totes onto a picking trolley, and pick the order whilst walking along the aisles. Picking consists of scanning the barcode on the shelf, then scanning each book, then scanning the barcode of the tote. Picking errors are immediately displayed on the gun.

When all orders of the trolley are picked, the picker goes to the end of line where, up until August 2022, the orders were packed manually. Solera – Rent a Book’s first significant investment in its operations was to acquire WMS and picking software from Mecalux. As a result of this, the subsequent priority became packing, leading it to invest in packaging machines from Durrenberg that went live in August 2022, just ahead of the start of the 2022/23 school year.

Durrenberg recommended that Solera – Rent a Book should change its previous original American Fefco 0201 package format for the Fefco 0453 + lid. This provides greater robustness during transport, is more visually appealing, is easier to open, and would make it easier in the future to pick directly into the shipping package.

The equipment supplied by Durrenberg comprised refurbished machines that had undergone the standard Durrenberg refurbishment programme, namely changing all wear parts and potentially obsolete components, fully recommissioning the machines, and offering a nominal one-year warranty. The refurbished packaging machines were purchased by Solera – Rent a Book at half-price versus new.

Under the new system, cardboard trays are erected by an automated erector running at 900 trays per hour, and are closed by an automated lidding machine with height reduction capability at a speed of 700 boxes per hour. With these new packaging machines, packing now consists of grabbing an erected tray, applying the ship label onto the under-face, transferring the books from the tote to the tray, and placing the tray on the infeed conveyor of the closing machine.

Thanks to the Durrenberg machines, the chaos experienced during each of the previous years’ peak periods did not recur, and Solera – Rent a Book could smoothly and successfully get through the season with only a handful of temporary workers operating in the packing area.