• 
• Czechia
• Pharma

European pharmacy giant Dr. Max automates order picking and replenishment with Brightpick Autopicker

Dr. Max, the second largest pharmacy chain in Europe, fully automates its order picking and stock replenishment using Brightpick Autopicker robots in its Prague distribution center. The company now uses the AI robots to reliably replenish pharmacies and hospitals across the country.

Challenges

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

The company faced several challenges with manual order picking and inventory replenishment:

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

The company also faced major maintenance challenges with previous automation technologies, such as extended production shutdowns to repair mini-loads and frequent replacement of QR codes needed for AGV navigation. As a result, Dr. Max sought a new solution that was not only easy to implement and scale but also cost-effective and low-maintenance.

Solution

To solve these challenges, Dr. Max installed Brightpick Autopicker robots in late 2023. The award-winning Brightpick Autopicker is the only mobile robot in the world that robotically picks and consolidates orders directly in the warehouse aisles, like a human with a cart. This eliminates the need for human picking and significantly reduces the time and labor required for order fulfillment.

Brightpick Autopicker is powered by proprietary 3D machine vision and AI algorithms, which have been trained on more than a billion picks to date and use machine learning to improve with each pick. In the event that Brightpick Autopicker is unable to pick an item (for example due to damaged packaging), the robot automatically takes those items to a backup Goods-to-Person station for picking, thereby ensuring 100% pick success at all times.

In addition to order picking, Brightpick Autopickers also autonomously replenish and put away inventory.

“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 integrate more robots.”

Tomáš Seget, Deputy Director of Logistics at Dr. Max

Brightpick Autopickers navigate narrow warehouse aisles using advanced vision technology, eliminating the need for QR codes or magnetic tape, which lowers maintenance costs. Their sophisticated navigation system also means the robots don’t require safety fencing, ensuring Dr. Max maintains full access to inventory even in emergency situations like power failures or natural disasters.

As a medical distributor, Dr. Max faces stringent regulatory requirements. Brightpick’s software ensures compliance by independently tracking each SKU and batch, enabling swift isolation and recall of specific batches if needed, for example in the case of a defective batch. In addition, Brightpick provides real-time visibility into fulfillment and inventory and prioritizes picking from batches with the earliest expiration date.

Results

The first phase of the installation, completed in 2023, deployed eight Brightpick Autopickers, handling 8,000 pharmaceutical picks per day without any human involvement.

“Brightpick enabled us to reallocate all our human pickers to quality control instead. We also see that the picking accuracy has improved significantly.”

Tomáš Seget, Deputy Director of Logistics at Dr. Max

Brightpick Autopicker significantly improved operational performance for Dr. Max:

• Labor savings: 100% reduction in picking labor, with all human pickers reallocated to other workflows such as quality control.
• Increased throughput: 40% increase in throughput from the same footprint.
• Improved picking accuracy: The robots have virtually eliminated picking errors, leading to improved patient care, enhanced inventory tracking and reduced costs from order corrections.
• Enhanced scalability: Dr. Max can easily scale throughput by adding additional robots with minimal effort.
• Improved reliability: Since going live, Brightpick has delivered an uptime of 100%, enabled by the fact that each robot operates independently and there is no single point of failure.

Following the success of this installation, Dr. Max plans to double the size of the solution in late 2024 and is also evaluating installing Brightpick Dispatcher for post-pick order consolidation and dispatch in the same warehouse.

“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 offers AI robots for warehouses to easily automate every step of their order fulfillment. The innovative robots enable warehouses of any size to fully automate order picking, consolidation, dispatch and stock replenishment. The award-winning Brightpick solution takes just weeks to deploy and enables companies to reduce their fulfillment labor to a minimum. Headquartered near Cincinnati, OH, Brightpick has more than 200 employees and is part of Photoneo Brightpick Group, which has over 8000 technology installations across the US, Europe and Asia. For more information, contact us here.