Short lead times, maximized shelf life

The grocery industry is one of the most challenging retail sectors from a logistics perspective. Retailers distribute goods to retail stores with frequent deliveries to ensure product freshness. In today’s omni-channel world, customers expect to be able to order, receive and return their goods in the most convenient way they choose.

Also, e-commerce retailers are faced with the challenge of delivering small-volume orders directly to consumers within 24 to 48 hours. Many retailers use drop shipping as their retail fulfillment method. A store doesn’t keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when a store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third-party supplier and has it shipped directly to the customer.

Picking fresh produce and dairy products

Our automatic order picking systems are highly effective solutions for automating full-crate handling and are ideally suited for the distribution networks of large grocery retailers to handle fresh fruit and vegetables as well as dairy products. Our solutions are based on gantry-type robots. They accurately and rapidly prepare orders for the retail stores, enabling Just-in-Time (JIT) deliveries within tight windows. Additionally, they enable goods to be transported to the supermarkets without the need for any further processing.

Goods-to-person picking

Our Cimcorp 3D Shuttle provides an innovative and cost-effective solution to the challenges posed by grocery retail, e-commerce and 3PL. The Cimcorp 3D Shuttle is designed for handling goods that can be stored in plastic crates or totes – which, for many retailers, are used in the major part of their product range. It is ideal for handling slow-moving products, storing a wide range of SKUs and retrieving the required items when needed.

Benefits for eCommerce order picking

The stack-handling capability of the high-speed robots, combined with the ingenious shuttle solution, makes Cimcorp 3D Shuttle extremely efficient. In fact, order picking is six times more efficient than in a manual solution. As the number of SKUs and size of storage increase, the system becomes unrivalled in its efficiency.

Efficient robotic order picking

Our order fulfillment systems adapt easily to inventory and volume increases, seasonal fluctuations and order structure changes, giving a high degree of operational flexibility. A variable number of robots serving the storage area and the ability to add further storage modules to the system mean that our solutions can be designed to suit the throughput.

An excellent cost vs. storage capacity ratio comes through the reduced amount of equipment – as no racking or sprinklers are needed – and allows for high-storage density.

‘Islands’ of automation

Our order picking solutions for full-crate picking and Goods-to-Person picking can operate as ‘islands’ of automation. When fully integrated with the surrounding manual operations, these solutions are appropriate for the goods stored in totes and with non-tote-based products that are either handled manually or through other picking techniques.