John Lewis opens new distribution centres for even faster delivery

British department store John Lewis has opened two new distributions centres in its Milton Keynes campus, the result of a 150 million pounds investment. The new buildings, known as Magna Park 2 and 3 will function alongside of Magna Park 1, the 100 million pound facility John Lewis opened in 2009.

The new centres feature state of the art technology designed to move stock to packers, which process orders for the stores as well as for online customers and make it possible to combine fashion and other categories together into a single delivery, in a much shorter amount of time.

For example, the garment distribution sector in Magna Park 2 is able to store 1.6 million garments and process up to 5,000 packages an hour. This means that once the new centres go live next week John Lewis will be able to send 850,000 fewer parcels every year and see its delivery drivers cover 190,000 fewer miles. John Lewis's 46 UK stores are set to receive daily shipments of goods as well as Click & Collect orders.

The new distribution centres are said to be the result of changing shopping habits, as the percentage of customer orders being delivered has increased from 4 percent to 47 percent within the last decade.