• 
• Czech Republic
• E-grocery

One of Europe’s largest e-grocers chooses Brightpick solution for Prague fulfillment center

Rohlik Group is one of Europe’s largest e-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 order picking, order consolidation across picking zones, 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 by 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 Dispatcher 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 dispatch 300 orders per hour and accommodate up to 60 different routes at once.

Results

The Brightpick solution enabled Rohlik to:

• Automate order picking, consolidation and dispatch in a brownfield environment without disrupting ongoing operations
• Reduce labor by 100% in the automation area, equivalent to over 30 FTEs
• Increase peak throughput by picking orders in advance, thereby smoothing out daily volumes

Following the success of this installation, Rohlik Group decided to roll out the Brightpick solution across multiple additional warehouses in 2023 and 2024, starting with Munich in July 2023 and continuing with Frankfurt, Vienna, Prague and other fulfillment centers. You can read the full announcement here.

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.