Also known as a ‘grocery fulfilment centre’, the Enfield dotcom store is effectively a warehouse dedicated to handling customers’ online grocery orders prior to home delivery. Currently, employees pick online orders straight from the shelves of Tesco’s retail stores. The dotcom store, Tesco’s fourth, will take over picking for online grocery orders from nine Tesco retail stores in the region.
Dematic’s Sales Project Manager, Shane Faulkner, says that Dematic’s complete system enables Tesco to pick and deliver as many orders as ten retail stores, but within the floor space of a single dotcom store. “This is an advantage in areas where rents are high. Also by automating its online order picking process, Tesco can increase volumes while at the same time maintaining the high service levels that are essential with home delivery.”
The Multishuttle system was a good fit for Tesco’s vision of its grocery home delivery service. “With each of our stores we aim to move forward the model in terms of accuracy and quality for the customers as well as productivity for Tesco,” explained David Burroughs, Tesco’s operations development manager.
Tesco was particularly keen on Dematic’s Multishuttle system. “Dematic’s Multishuttle offers a number of advantages over similar systems, particularly its speed for loading our vans and its ability to swap individual shuttles, which gives us a tremendous advantage in avoiding downtime. Furthermore, the height of the Multishuttle enables us to make good use of space that would otherwise be dead air in the warehouse, thereby minimising its footprint,” said Burroughs.
The integrated installation will feature zone routing and separate Multishuttle tote order consolidation buffers for ambient and chilled goods. Dematic’s zone picking system will route customer totes directly to numerous pick zones in the ambient area, where some 18,000 different SKUs are held, and to the 3000 different SKUs across zones in the chilled area.
Tesco staff will pick grocery, fresh produce and bakery goods into the order totes according to instructions received via wrist-mounted radio data terminals. Once scanned, totes will be sent to the next relevant zone via conveyor. Complete totes are then routed to the Multishuttle consolidation buffers.
The four-aisle ambient Multishuttle unit will hold up to 10,500 totes for home deliveries, while the two-aisle chilled Multishuttle will hold 4000 totes. Once consolidated, the totes will be sent in reversed customer drop sequence to one of the centre’s 28 van loading bays.
All of the integrated system’s operations will be controlled by the Dematic Warehouse Control System (WCS) and Dematic will also carry out the order slotting for all products in all of the zones.