One of Europe’s largest online grocers chooses Brightpick solution for Prague Fulfillment Center

Rohlik Group is one of Europe’s largest online grocers with more than 12 million orders per year and 1.5 million customers across the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and Hungary.

Challenges

Rohlik’s fulfillment center in Prague holds 18,000 SKUs and ships out 7,000 orders per day. The warehouse consists of various picking zones to handle ambient, fresh, chilled, frozen and bulky items. Items in each zone are picked into totes (bins) and then sent via conveyor belts to a dispatch area, where they are consolidated into complete orders and prepared for driver pickup.

Rohlik wanted an automated solution that would work in their existing mezzanine structure in the ambient picking zone. They also wanted an end-to-end solution that could automate both order picking and dispatch.

Solution

Brightpick helped Rohlik automate order picking, consolidation and dispatch. 

For the order picking, Brightpick installed a Goods-to-Robot solution in the ambient mezzanine. The solution uses existing shelving that was previously used for human pickers. This enabled Rohlik to leverage its existing footprint, avoid additional capital investment, and install Brightpick in weeks without interrupting operations.

Brightpick’s industry-leading machine vision and AI capabilities enable it to robotically pick all 2,500 SKUs in this picking zone, which means zero human labor is required. The solution is designed to achieve 600 picks per hour. It operates 18 hours per day and has achieved over 99.5% uptime since going live. It also met the strict performance targets necessary for Rohlik to deliver customer orders in 60 minutes or less.

“Brightpick enabled us to fully automate our order picking without making any major changes to our existing warehouse processes. Their solution enabled us to practically eliminate our picking labor and reduce our picking costs.”

Aleš Malucha, Chief Engineering Officer at Rohlik Group

Brightpick also helped Rohlik automate order consolidation and dispatch. After all the items are picked into order totes in the various picking zones, they are sent via conveyor belts to a dispatch area. There, Brightpick Dispatchers (autonomous mobile robots) retrieve the order totes from the conveyor belt and consolidate them into complete orders. Brightpick’s Intuition software guides Brightpick Dispatchers to deliver the totes in a way that ensures the drivers know exactly which totes belong to which order.

In addition, Brightpick Dispatchers can temporarily store consolidated orders in a staging area until they need to be dispatched. This enables Rohlik to pick orders in advance before they need to be dispatched, thereby smoothing out volumes throughout the day and increasing peak throughput. Over 1,000 order totes can be stored here at a time.

“Brightpick provided a flexible automation solution for our dispatch process, which required very high and stable throughput. Their solution will enable us to reduce our labor needs and improve efficiency and quality by preparing orders for each route.”

Aleš Malucha, Chief Engineering Officer at Rohlik Group

The solution can be extended to dispatch 300 orders per hour and to accommodate 60 different routes at once.

Results

The Brightpick solution enabled Rohlik to:

• Automate order picking, consolidation and dispatch in a brownfield environment without disrupting operations
• Reduce picking labor by 100% in the automation area
• Increase peak throughput by picking orders in advance, thereby smoothing out daily volumes

About Brightpick
Brightpick offers the world’s most efficient warehouse automation solution for ecommerce and grocery order fulfillment. The company’s end-to-end robotic solution autonomously picks, consolidates and dispatches orders in large, small and micro fulfillment centers. The Brightpick solution takes less than a month to deploy, enables warehouses to reduce their picking labor by 95%, and cuts costs for order fulfillment by half. Brightpick, headquartered near Cincinnati, OH, is part of Photoneo Brightpick Group, which has more than 300 employees and 5000 technology installations across the US, Europe and Asia. Photoneo Brightpick Group’s customers include leading companies such as General Motors, Volkswagen and KUKA. For more information, contact us here.