Brightpick robots to automate order picking, consolidation and dispatch for Rohlik Group

Brightpick, a provider of warehouse automation solutions for order fulfillment, today announced the successful completion of a nine-month pilot of its robotic solution in the Prague fulfillment center of Rohlik Group, one of the largest e-grocers in Europe. Rohlik now plans to roll out the Brightpick solution across multiple warehouses in 2023 and 2024, starting with Munich in July 2023 and continuing with Frankfurt, Vienna, Prague and other fulfillment centers.

The solution includes Brightpick Autopicker and Brightpick Dispatcher autonomous mobile robots and enables Rohlik to fully automate picking, consolidation and dispatch of orders, Brightpick noted.

Grocery orders contain an average of 30 items per order, according to data from McKinsey & Co., so item picking is a major operational challenge, Brightpick added. In addition, according to research from Grocery Doppio, while 78% of grocers state rising workforce costs as one of their top three challenges and 92% are dissatisfied with online order picking efficiency. A typical grocery fulfillment center also has to contend with various picking zones to handle ambient, fresh, chilled and frozen items. Brightpick stated that it offers the only mobile robot solution that automates both picking and order consolidation across these different zones. 

Rohlik has more than 1.5 million e-grocery customers and 12 million orders per year. Once fully deployed in the Munich warehouse, Brightpick will be able to dispatch over 1,000 order totes (bins) per hour and 5,000 completed orders per day (an order may contain multiple totes).

Brightpick said its solution contains three technologies that are valuable to grocers that want to automate their fulfillment warehouses: Brightpick Autopicker robots for picking items and consolidating orders in the aisles, Brightpick Dispatcher robots for consolidating orders arriving from different picking zones, and Brightpick Intuition software to orchestrate and optimize the entire Brightpick robotic fleet.

The recently announced Brightpick Autopicker robots are like humans with carts that move around the warehouse, retrieve product storage totes from shelving, and robotically pick items from those totes to consolidate orders directly in the aisles. The robots do not need to travel back and forth to centralized picking stations, which results in faster picking, BrightPick added.

“Brightpick will enable us to significantly reduce our labor costs across our fulfillment network while increasing accuracy and efficiency,” said Ales Malucha, Chief Engineering Officer of the Rohlik Group. “We greatly value the flexibility and robustness of the Brightpick solution.”

Rohlik Group includes well-known brands Rohlik.cz in the Czech Republic, Knuspr.de in Germany, Gurkerl.at in Austria, Kifli.hu in Hungary and Sezamo.ro in Romania. 

“We are deeply committed to helping grocers increase margins,” said Jan Zizka, CEO and co-founder of Brightpick. “Rohlik’s successful pilot and planned rollout of our Brighpick solution across Europe provides further validation of our solution for grocers. They are tremendously respected in Europe and we look forward to working closely with them in this next phase of deployment.”

Brightpick, headquartered near Cincinnati, OH, is part of Photoneo Brightpick Group, which has more than 300 employees and 5000 technology installations across the US, Europe and Asia.