E-Commerce Facility Sorting and Warehousing at Istanbul International Airport (IST)

Overview

MNG Airlines engaged BNP for a feasibility study to develop two facilities for E-commerce and warehousing.

• An e-commerce processing/sorting facility for processing e-commerce items from air to ground transport, including sorting, security, customs processes, and storage for customs-bonded goods.
• An airside customs-free zone warehouse to act as a quick response B2B fulfillment center for premium products via air, leveraging Istanbul International Airport as a transit and distribution hub between the East and the West.

E-commerce Facility

For the e-commerce facility, several options were evaluated based on the available plots of land, the potential reuse or modification of existing facilities, and the level of automation. An exciting challenge in this project is the significant elevation difference (~7 meters) across the plot, the split lots, and existing substantial utilities. Management briefs evaluating the options were provided, including high-level cost estimates.

Proposed Technology

The proposed technology consisted of a stacked set of cross-belt sortation systems that sorted items to chutes connecting to trolleys. The trolleys feature a flexible bottom that lowers as weight is added, thus reducing the drop distance from the chute into the trolley. The trolleys can be manually moved around, towed with a small tractor, or handled by automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in the future. The capacity is 15,000 items per hour to 100 chutes/destinations.

Airside Free Zone Warehouse

For the airside free zone warehouse, the lot was fixed. Still, there was uncertainty about the potential business that required a high degree of flexibility to transition from a low-cost, manual operation to a high-throughput, automated process without significant operational disruption. The ultimate capacity when maximizing the site and automation is 37,000 pallet positions.

The warehouse includes security and customs functions for incidental use. It has direct airside access with ULD break and builds positions to enable quick response time from order to fulfillment.