• 
• Czechia
• Pharma

Dr. Max automates pharmacy and hospital replenishment with Brightpick

Dr. Max, Europe’s second-largest pharmacy chain, has fully automated the picking and storage of slow-moving SKUs at its Prague distribution center using 19 Autopickers. These AI robots now reliably replenish pharmacies and hospitals nationwide.

Challenges

Dr. Max is the second largest pharmacy chain in Europe with 3,000 pharmacies across 6 countries.

The company faced several challenges when manually picking slow-moving SKUs:

• Labor-intensive processes: Pickers spent excessive time walking and retrieving products from storage.
• Picking errors: Manual picking errors hurt customer care, increased quality control costs, and complicated inventory tracking.
• Limited scalability: Human pickers struggled to keep up with growing order volumes, leading to bottlenecks and delivery delays, especially during peak hours.

The company also faced significant maintenance issues with previous automation systems, including prolonged production shutdowns to repair mini-loads and constant replacement of QR codes for AGV navigation. Dr. Max therefore sought a new solution that was easy to deploy, scale and maintain.

Solution

To overcome these challenges, Dr. Max deployed 9 Autopicker robots in late 2023 and added an additional 10 robots in 2025.

The award-winning Brightpick Autopicker is a multi-purpose AI robot that automates a wide range of warehouse workflows. Powered by advanced 3D vision and AI, Autopicker can reliably pick 100% of Dr. Max’s product range, practically eliminating the need for human picking.

The installation also includes a backup Goods-to-Person station, used when a robot can’t pick an item (for example if the packaging is damaged) or when a single order line requires many picks, which can be done more efficiently by a human.

In addition to order picking, the Autopickers autonomously handle stock replenishment and dynamic slotting. Powered by Brightpick Intuition software, the system tracks each SKU and batch individually, enabling effortless inventory recalls and cycle counts. It also provides real-time visibility into fulfillment workflows and inventory, and can prioritize picking from batches with the earliest expiration dates.

Using SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) and AI-powered navigation, Brightpick Autopickers navigate the warehouse solely through vision. This removes the need for QR codes, floor markers, or safety fencing – simplifying maintenance and giving Dr. Max uninterrupted access to the system and inventory at all times.

“What we liked about Brightpick was the ease and time of installation. The scalability ensures that as we expand our SKU range, we can seamlessly add more robots.”

Tomáš Seget, Deputy Director of Logistics at Dr. Max

Results

After installing 19 Autopickers, Dr. Max is able to pick 15,000 items per day without practically any human involvement.

“Brightpick enabled us to significantly improve picking accuracy and to reallocate all our human pickers to quality control instead.”

Tomáš Seget, Deputy Director of Logistics at Dr. Max

Dr. Max realized multiple benefits from Brightpick:

• Labor savings: 95% reduction in picking labor, down from 10 pickers per shift to just 0.5 – with a single person now handling both decanting and G2P picking.
• Increased capacity: 40% increase in throughput and storage capacity from the same footprint.
• Improved picking accuracy: Picking errors have been virtually eliminated, resulting in improved patient care, better inventory tracking, and lower costs from order corrections.
• Enhanced scalability: Dr. Max can now scale operations effortlessly by simply adding more robots and shelving – without increasing labor costs.
• Improved reliability: 100% uptime enabled by the fact that each robot operates independently and there is no single point of failure.

“We are already thinking about other locations in the warehouse that would benefit from also having Brightpick robots.”

Tomáš Seget, Deputy Director of Logistics at Dr. Max

About Brightpick
Brightpick is a leader in AI-powered robotic solutions for warehouses. The company’s multi-purpose AI robots enable warehouses of any size to fully automate order picking, buffering, consolidation, dispatch, and stock replenishment. The award-winning Brightpick solution takes just weeks to deploy and allows companies to keep their warehouse labor to a minimum. Headquartered near Cincinnati, Ohio, Brightpick has more than 250 employees and hundreds of AI robots deployed with customers across the U.S. and Europe.