• 
• Slovakia
• Ecommerce

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

MTBIKER, the largest cycling e-shop in Central Europe, automates storage and retrieval with 19 Brightpick Retriever robots fulfilling thousands of orders per week.

Challenges

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.

The retailer recently moved into a new fulfillment center and sought an automated system to speed up picking, reduce labor, and increase storage density. They needed a solution with low upfront costs that could scale easily without high expenses or operational disruption.

Solution

MTBIKER installed 19 Brightpick Retriever robots, a Goods-to-Person solution designed to achieve 300 order lines 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 a specific packout station.

Brightpick’s Goods-to-Person stations are ergonomically designed for human pickers. Before arriving at the station, the Retriever 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 which items to pick. This reduces physical strain and results in fewer mispicks and fulfillment errors.

Brightpick Retrievers work with standard shelving and require aisles just 3 feet (90cm) wide. MTBIKER can increase capacity by adding additional robots and new shelving, which can be assembled in hours. The robots navigate using advanced vision technology, eliminating the need for QR codes or navigation markers on the floor, which simplifies maintenance and deployment.

“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, the robots also autonomously replenish inventory. Brightpick Retrievers take empty totes out of storage and put away newly-replenished totes into storage. The robots also perform dynamic slotting during off-peak hours and at night to ensure maximum throughput during the day.

Results 

Brightpick provided a flexible solution that enabled MTBIKER to:

• Cut picking labor from 6-7 people per shift to one person
• Reduce human picking errors and improve customer satisfaction
• Easily add additional storage capacity and throughput on demand
• Double storage density without making any changes to the warehouse

“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 watch a podcast with Tomas Cervenka, CEO of MTBIKER, to discover how he scaled MTBIKER to become Central Europe’s largest online cycling retailer.

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, Ohio, Brightpick has more than 250 employees and hundreds of AI robots deployed with customers across the U.S. and Europe. For more information, contact us here.