• 
• Slovakia
• Cycling

Major cycling e-shop in Central Europe automates order fulfillment with Brightpick

MTBIKER is one of the largest cycling e-shops in Central Europe, offering over 60,000 SKUs including bicycle components, cycling accessories, sports apparel and more. The company ships out 200,000 orders per year to 25 European countries, with a focus on central Europe.

Challenges

MTBIKER recently added a new fulfillment center and was looking for an automated fulfillment system to increase efficiency and reduce labor needs. The company wanted a solution that had a low upfront cost and could easily scale without incurring high costs or disrupting operations.

Solution

Brightpick installed a Goods-to-Person solution designed to achieve 300 presentations and 450 picks per hour with one human picking station.

Brightpick Retriever robots retrieve totes from storage and transport them to a human picking station. Each robot has two tote positions: one for the storage tote and another for the order tote where the order is picked. Human operators pick items from the storage tote into the order tote. Once the order is picked, Brightpick Retrievers deliver the order tote to packout stations.

Brightpick’s Goods-to-Person stations are ergonomically designed for human pickers. Before arriving at the station, Brightpick’s robots automatically raise both totes to waist height to enable the operator to pick with minimal effort. In addition, each robot carries a mounted tablet within easy reach that tells the operator how many items to pick. This reduces physical strain and results in fewer mispicks and fulfillment errors.

Brightpick Retrievers work with standard shelving 10 feet (3 meters) tall and require aisles just 3 feet (90cm) wide. MTBIKER can increase capacity by simply adding new shelving, which can be assembled in hours, and additional robots. The robots use LiDAR for navigation and do not require any QR codes or magnetic tape on the floor, which means new robots can be added with minimal effort.

“With Brightpick, we can easily scale both throughput and storage. This enables us to reduce our upfront capital investment and to invest in additional capacity gradually, when we actually need it. With other solutions, we had to predict throughput three years in advance because we could not scale as seamlessly.”

Tomas Cervenka, CEO of MTBIKER

In addition to order picking, Brightpick also autonomously replenishes inventory. Brightpick Retrievers take empty totes out of storage and put away newly refilled totes back into storage. In addition, the robots perform dynamic slotting during off-peak hours and at night. This involves the robots optimizing tote positions inside the storage area to maximize overall volumes and speed, for example by storing totes with faster-moving merchandise closer to picking stations or optimizing tote positions for the next day’s order backlog.

Results 

Brightpick provided a flexible solution that enabled MTBIKER to:

• Automate order picking and replenishment
• Reduce picking labor by over 95%
• Achieve 300 presentations and 450 picks per hour
• Easily add additional capacity as the company continues expanding
• Double their storage density

“Before installing the Brightpick solution, our picking process was entirely manual. Brightpick enabled us to increase our throughput, shorten picking times and reduce costs. The solution combines nicely with our existing processes, doesn’t have any complicated building or layout requirements and is a lot simpler to operate and maintain than other solutions we have looked at.”

Tomas Cervenka, CEO of MTBIKER

Click here to read an interview with Tomas Cervenka, CEO of MTBIKER, about why he chose the Brightpick solution.

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 Brightpick solution takes weeks to deploy and enables companies to reduce their picking labor by 98% and cut picking costs by half. Headquartered near Cincinnati, OH, Brightpick has more than 200 employees and is part of Photoneo Brightpick Group, which has over 7000 technology installations across the US, Europe and Asia. For more information, contact us here.