In the Region New Jersey - The Personal Touch, With Robotic Assistance - NYTimes.com

Tiffany has an office and warehouse-distribution center in Parsippany, expanded at a cost of $19 million two years ago. But that facility's primary purpose is to replenish inventory at stores, according to information on company property holdings available online.

In Hanover, at the new 283,000-square-foot structure set back from Parsippany Road, 30,000 square feet is devoted to office space, a training facility, conference rooms, a full-service kitchen and cafeteria; and 34,000 square feet is occupied by various specialty service workshops -- embossing, machine engraving, etching, polishing and watch repair. The storage racks and distribution operation occupy the rest of the $70 million structure.

The goods arrive by truck, each item in its own plastic tote box with a snap-on lid -- like something one might buy at the supermarket for storing leftovers -- sealed inside bubble wrap and bearing a bar code sticker. The bar codes are read by scanners as the items enter the computer-controlled Stratus system on a conveyor belt, and the computer assigns each tote box one of 70,000 available storage positions on a massive rack, 200 feet long, 100 feet wide and 40 feet high.

The one-story steel-framed structure has a brick and precast concrete facade for the office area, with ample windows, Mr. Brown said. The distribution center area has 10-inch-thick concrete walls, with a two-tone sandblasted finish. The workshops are at one end of the distribution area, he said.

THE distribution center has 20 active loading docks, Mr. Brown said, with the capacity for more, and a 500-car parking lot for employees, whose ranks swell during the winter and spring holiday seasons, when Tiffany does its greatest volume of business.

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But those who helped build the structure say it is a gem in the realm of distribution center design. In interviews conducted before the Tiffany spokeswoman said the company would provide no details, executives from JMB Associates described a concrete-walled enclave -- with the store's signature sculpture of Atlas holding a Tiffany clock over the entry -- housing a computerized, roboticized storage and packing system that requires human beings at only two points along nearly two miles of conveyor belts: at a sorting station routing items for engraving, etching, polishing or packing and at a boxing station, where the traditional white ribbon bow is tied by human hands around each trademark blue Tiffany's box.

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The style is discreet, yet dazzling, like a Tiffany & Company diamond watch, platinum ring or si *** er spoon. But this is a warehouse.

There are more than 200 security cameras keeping an eye on the Tiffany wares at all times as they are moved to storage, kept on racks and routed through the distribution center, on their way to one of 168 packing stations, he said.

The famous Fifth Avenue store, portrayed by Hollywood in ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'' as a place where a young woman might glean a little class and glamour just by looking in the windows, opened a high-security high-technology ''customer fulfillment center'' last month in Hanover, just off Route 10.

According to Mr. Alt, the system works like this:

The building, which houses a custom-designed storage and distribution system devised by Knapp, an Austrian engineering firm, is kept guarded from the public. Tiffany declined to have it photographed or to permit the architect to release a rendering, and a spokeswoman said two executives familiar with its construction were ''unreachable'' for comment. SJP Properties, which worked with local authorities to secure the necessary approvals for the project, did not publicize its role.

The JMB project executive for the Tiffany building, Andrew R. Alt, said the best way he could think to describe the mechanized Knapp Stratus distribution system is ''like a giant vending machine.'' The software the Stratus system uses to operate was designed by Tiffany's own technologists working with a company called Manhattan Associates, said Mr. Alt, and took about a year to develop.

''The building is designed to fill Internet and telephone orders and process them very rapidly with a minimum of people,'' said Jeffrey M. Brown, president of JMB. ''With their existing facilities, Tiffany had not been able to do that.''