E-Grocer unveiled for automated online fulfilment

The retailer is operating the new E-Grocer solution from KNAPP at its Madrid distribution facility. Combining automated handling and the best of manual systems, E-Grocer delivers unbeatable efficiency and cost-effectiveness, says Knapp.

Online grocery retail is a rapidly growing sector. In the UK, for example, online grocery sales more than doubled between 2007 and 2012 and Mintel forecasts sales for the sector to increase by a further 79% on 2012 levels by 2017. 

Despite this huge potential, online food retail remains a niche market and an aggressively competitive one. It presents significant logistics challenges in the form of unpredictable order structures, large product ranges with ever-changing promotional campaigns, tight delivery windows and the need to store goods in various temperature zones.

With its E-Grocer solution, KNAPP is tackling these challenges head-on to provide a system with the required efficiency, capacity and flexibility to adjust dynamically to the changing conditions in the online grocery sector.

In the E-Grocer solution, overstock is stored on pallets. The fastest-moving products in the warehouse are picked directly from pallets using paperless picking technologies such as KiSoft Voice, KNAPP’s voice picking system, or KiSoft Vision, its augmented reality solution. For a large portion of the product range, storage and picking from the pallet is highly efficient and avoids the costs of depalletising the goods. The remainder of the dry goods are stored in KNAPP’s space-saving OSR Shuttle automated storage system and picked at the ergonomically designed Pick-it-Easy workstations. This mix of person-to-goods manual picking and goods-to-person automated picking results in an optimal balance of efficiency and cost. After order picking, totes are stored temporarily in a fully automatic dispatch buffer, also based on the proven OSR Shuttle technology.

Tudespensa.com offers groceries, perfume and cosmetics to Spanish consumers, 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. With over 2,000 brands and 5,000 products available in delivery slots from 9am to 11pm Monday to Saturday, Tudespensa has to work hard to keep its promise of delivering freshness. The E-Grocer solution supplied to Tudespensa features two OSR Shuttle systems with a total of five lines of racking. Two of these are used for the double-deep storage of ambient goods – with 9,216 storage locations – while the other three lines are cooled to six degrees Celsius to be used for the storage of fresh foods and as a dispatch buffer, with 4,680 storage locations.

Tudespensa uses a single container for storage, picking and dispatch, with the goods differentiated by coloured plastic bags that are hung inside. In the manual warehouse areas – the frozen goods cold store and the fast-mover area – KNAPP’s KiSoft Voice voice-directed picking solution is used for accurate and efficient picking. For the goods in the automated store, picking is carried out at five Pick-it-Easy workstations and KNAPP’s KiSoft WMS handles warehouse management and control. After dry goods have been picked, the order is completed with the fresh goods and then temporarily stored in the OSR Shuttle dispatch buffer. The buffer then retrieves the containers in a precise sequence and conveys them to an area where they are automatically stacked on dollies, ready for dispatch. The E-Grocer solution at Tudespensa’s Madrid logistics centre handles more than 4,500 picks per hour and can dispatch 3,100 correctly sequenced containers in just four hours.