In context
In 2023, online grocery fulfillment faced mounting pressure from rising labor costs and inefficiencies in order picking, especially for orders averaging 30 items. Robotic automation was emerging as a key response, and European e-grocer Rohlik Group sought to scale such technology beyond a single site.
What was reported
Brightpick, a warehouse automation provider, completed a nine-month pilot of its robotic solution at Rohlik's Prague fulfillment center. Rohlik, one of Europe's largest e-grocers with over 1.5 million customers and 12 million orders annually, plans to deploy the system across multiple warehouses in 2023 and 2024, starting with Munich in July 2023, followed by Frankfurt, Vienna, Prague, and others.
The solution combines Brightpick Autopicker robots, which pick items and consolidate orders directly in aisles, and Brightpick Dispatcher robots for consolidating orders from different picking zones. Brightpick Intuition software orchestrates the fleet. The robots handle ambient, fresh, chilled, and frozen items, automating both picking and consolidation across zones—a capability Brightpick says is unique among mobile robot solutions.
Once fully deployed in Munich, the system is expected to dispatch over 1,000 order totes per hour and 5,000 completed orders per day. Brightpick reports 99.9% picking accuracy and claims the solution can reduce picking labor by 95% and cut order fulfillment costs by half. The Autopicker robots use machine vision and AI trained on over 250 million picks, with goods-to-person capability for items requiring human dexterity.
Why it mattered
This deployment signaled a shift toward multi-site, end-to-end robotic automation in grocery e-commerce, addressing labor cost challenges and complex multi-temperature fulfillment. The scalability and claimed accuracy improvements highlighted the potential for broader adoption across the logistics industry.
“Brightpick will enable us to significantly reduce our labor costs across our fulfillment network while increasing accuracy and efficiency.”
Source: Robotics & Automation News (roboticsandautomationnews.com) · Published 2023-09-05 · “European e-grocer Rohlik to install Brightpick robots at ‘multiple warehouses’”