Mountain Warehouse partnered with Breathe Technologies to deploy Pick IQ across its Peterborough distribution centre, optimising manual picking for both retail and e-commerce channels without changing the underlying process pickers follow every day.
The challenge
Mountain Warehouse’s Peterborough site has always run a highly manual picking operation, and one that leans heavily on seasonal and temporary labour to absorb peaks like Black Friday. That put the operation under a particular kind of pressure: with limited room to improve efficiency and capacity by expanding headcount or floor space.
The seasonal reliance made this harder, not easier. Large numbers of temporary colleagues needed to be onboarded quickly, while still hitting throughput and accuracy targets, against a backdrop of rising living wage and National Insurance costs. Any solution had to be quick to learn and easy to sustain.
The product range added a further layer of complexity. Mountain Warehouse’s summer and winter ranges are very different in nature: winter stock in particular, coats, walking boots, wellies, is larger and more bulky, with a volumetric profile that behaves differently to picking and packaging planning than lighter summer lines.
The solution
Breathe Technologies deployed Pick IQ, Breathe’s standalone picking optimisation software, to the Peterborough operation. Pick IQ is a subscription software service that enhances the picking capability of major WMS platforms, including JDA and Manhattan, requiring no upfront capital investment and typically live within 12 weeks.
Pick IQ was configured to optimise the density, accuracy and profitability of Mountain Warehouse’s manual picking across both retail and e-commerce operations, taking into account the very different demands of its summer and winter ranges. Volumetric profiling was particularly valuable for the bulkier winter range, feeding directly into packaging decisions and generating meaningful packaging savings.
Critically, the picking process itself didn’t change for colleagues. Pickers continue to receive clear, step-by-step instructions through handheld devices or digital pick lists, scanning and picking exactly as before. Pick IQ works behind the scenes to optimise what’s picked and how, rather than asking colleagues to learn a new way of working.
