In the competitive arena of Europe’s grocery home delivery market, the Rohlik Group has raised the stakes with an audacious pledge: doorstep delivery of orders within an hour.
But that ambitious commitment puts significant pressure on the company’s fulfillment operations. To help it beat the clock, the e-grocery retailer has turned to robots. Working with the Cincinnati-based robotics company Brightpick, Rohlik launched a pilot program at its Prague, Czech Republic, fulfillment center, which holds 18,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) and ships out 7,000 orders per day.
All together, the Prague warehouse contains five picking zones—for ambient, fresh, chilled, frozen, and bulky items. For the pilot, Rohlik chose to focus on the ambient zone, which is located on a mezzanine and holds 2,500 SKUs stored on shelves. Here, human workers used to pick items for orders into totes, which were then sent via conveyor to the dispatching area. There, other workers consolidated the items into complete orders and prepared them for driver pickup.
Today, that’s all changed. Rohlik is now using AI (artificial intelligence)-powered autonomous mobile robots (AMRs)—specifically, Brightpick’s Autopicker and Dispatcher models—to automate the formerly manual tasks.
The fulfillment process now unfolds in a highly choreographed sequence of steps. Once an order is received, an Autopicker extracts a storage tote from the shelving unit and then uses its robotic arm to select the needed items and deposit them in an order tote. After sliding the storage tote back onto the shelf, the Autopicker takes the order tote over to a conveyor for delivery to a dispatch area.
Here, Brightpick’s Dispatcher AMRs swing into action. They retrieve the totes from the conveyor belt and consolidate the items into complete orders. The orders are then sent to a staging area, where they’re held until the driver arrives. Totes are staged in a way that ensures the drivers know exactly which totes belong to which order, Brightpick says.
Because the staging area can hold more than 1,000 order totes at a time, Rohlik is now able to pick orders in advance, thereby smoothing out volumes throughout the day. According to the supplier, the Brightpick Dispatchers currently handle 300 orders per hour across 60 different routes.
A PERFECT FIT
As for the results of the pilot, the numbers speak for themselves. Rohlik has been able to reduce its headcount by 25 to 30 full-time employees in the ambient picking zone and by 10 to 15 full-time employees in the dispatch area.
And the transition itself was relatively painless, according to the two companies. One of the reasons why Rohlik chose Brightpick was that the solution could be used with its existing shelving and picking layout. That eliminated the need for additional capital investment and allowed the company to install the new system in weeks without interrupting operations.
“Brightpick enabled us to fully automate our order picking without making any major changes to our existing warehouse processes,” Aleš Malucha, chief engineering officer at Rohlik Group, said in a case study published on Brightpick’s website. “Their solution enabled us to practically eliminate our picking labor and reduce our picking costs.”
The pilot in Prague was completed in June 2023, and the solution was deployed at Rohlik's Munich facility in July 2023. The company is now rolling out the Brightpick solution to its other warehouses in Germany. Beyond that, the company is looking to expand its use of robots beyond the ambient picking zone to its chilled picking operations.
