Evolving Store-based Grocery Home Shopping

Improving productivity and order capacity at cost effective level of Capital investment.

Concept
  • Manual put away of bulk pick and fast moving ambient items.
  • Decanting slower ambient lines, and all fresh produce into storage totes.
  • Automatic storage, retrieval and sequencing of SKUs in labelled totes
  • Totes routed to Zone picking lanes (fresh) and Goods to Person pick stations (ambient) on mezzanine floors.
  • Consolidation of completed picked orders in customer tote sequencing buffer.
  • Automatic routing of sequenced totes by van route into marshalling lanes at loading area.
  • Local Click-and-Collect capability as well as marshalling and loading of multi-temp orders for delivery van despatch.

Challenge

Limited capital investment budget available and mandatory speed to market of new concept operations.
Short ROI payback meant balancing productivity gains against capital investment.
Step change in Improvement on fulfilment accuracy and capacity of manual store-based solution.
Challenge of bespoke systems integration, inventory control, multi-site roll out in limited time period.
Requirement to enable phased construction/installation/test/launch of 3 operations with single project team.

Value

Benefits of project

Reduced CapEx for design and build by using single developer across multiple sites.
Agile learning, fail-fast ethos enabling re-engineering of Operational processes across phased launch of sites.
Healthy Return-on-Investment for limited spend
Improved Density, Ergonomics, System flexibility/accuracy with higher capacity and range of product available with longer shelf life.
Dedicated van fleet expanded to improve last-mile transportation and distribution costs.
Capability to expand automation in future phases of development to improve ROI.
Concept and Realisation videos