Pets at Home needed to digitise and automate their distribution operation, managing prescription pet medicine with specialist compliance, scaling e-commerce order volumes, and reducing dependency on temporary labour. Breathe Technologies delivered both, in two coordinated phases.
The challenge
Pets at Home has experienced accelerated growth across its multi-channel business; stores, e-commerce, and a growing subscription business for prescription pet medicine. To keep pace, the business needed to modernise and automate its Northampton distribution centre, increasing output without proportionally increasing headcount or operational complexity.
The challenge had two distinct dimensions. The first was regulatory: a significant proportion of Pets at Home’s online orders are for prescription pet medicines, which require a ‘suitably qualified person’ (SQP) to process each order. This was a manual, labour-intensive bottleneck that limited throughput and created compliance risk as volumes grew.
The second dimension was scale. With multiple competing warehouses in proximity to the Northampton site, recruiting and retaining sufficient temporary staff to cover peak periods was increasingly difficult and expensive. Pets at Home needed automation that would reduce their reliance on temporary headcount and give them a reliable, consistent operation at any volume level.
The solution
Phase 1: Pharma and SQP order automation
The first phase focused on mechanising the picking and packing process for SQP prescription orders, the most complex and compliance-critical part of the operation. Breathe’s BreatheIQ software integrated with Pets at Home’s Blue Yonder WMS, enabling enhanced order segregation by order type, routing, and automated packing through conveyors tailored to the SQP fulfilment flow.
The system automates containerisation based on order type, SKU profile, and packaging material selection, removing the manual decisions that previously required an SQP at each stage. Error rates reduced significantly, accuracy increased, and the volume of prescription orders that could be processed without additional specialist resource increased substantially.
BreatheIQ’s seamless interaction with Blue Yonder WMS meant higher volumes could be processed without creating bottlenecks at the system integration layer, a critical requirement for a high-volume, time-sensitive operation.
Phase 2: E-commerce order scaling
Phase 2 extended the automation programme to the broader e-commerce operation, boosting throughput and accuracy across the full range of web orders. Driven by BreatheIQ, units picked per hour increased across the site, with PackIQ software deployed to manage the various order streams: standard e-commerce, oversized items, wide-aisle picking, and SQP orders.
Upfront containerisation and automated packing were introduced across all general B2C e-commerce lines, removing mixed orders and improving the consistency and accuracy of every shipment leaving the warehouse.
