Over recent years Pets at Home has experienced accelerated growth in its multi-channel sales and needed to manage faster delivery and fulfilment. Pets at Home needed to digitise the business and become the specialist market leader for online pet care.
Breathe Technologies was commissioned to deliver the integration of a fully automated picking and packing operation of the business’ Northampton distribution centre, that would improve the efficiency of online order picking and increase output, particularly of subscription orders for prescription pet medicine to facilitate the ambitious growth targets.
Until this point, a ‘suitably qualified person’ (SQP) was required to process orders of this nature, and the pet products retailer required a more efficient way to manage these orders and cater for increasing demand.
Additionally, with a high number of warehouses in close proximity to its ecommerce distribution centre, Pets at Home was struggling to recruit, and hoped to overcome the requirement for temporary staff to cater for peak periods.
The first phase of the project focused on system process changes and mechanising the picking and packing process for the SQP orders.
Breathe’s warehouse software suite, Orquestr8 integrated with the automated packing system enabling:
Orquestr8 has seamless interaction with the JDA WMS which means higher volumes of orders can be processed without any bottlenecks.
Phase 2 of the project focussed on boosting web orders and improving packing processes to increase throughput and accuracy throughout the rest of the warehouse. Driven by Breathe Route, the units picked per hour increased, alongside Breathe Pack applications, which were deployed to tackle the various order streams such as eComm, uglies, wide aisle and SQP.
Pets at Home saw a vastly increased capability to manage and keep pace with customer demand whilst always having a full up to date picture of their processes.
