Sectors
Transforming eCommerce capabilities
THE CHALLENGE
Supporting the transformation of Pets at Home’s eCommerce business
Over recent years Pets at Home has experienced accelerated growth in its multi-channel sales. To manage faster delivery and multi-channel fulfillment, 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, increase output to facilitate the ambitious growth targets.
Fully automated picking and packing operation
Breathe was commissioned to improve the efficiency of online order picking and packing, particularly for prescription products such as pet medication.
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 also struggling to recruit, and in deploying new technology, hoped to overcome this requirement for temporary staff to cater for peak periods.
THE SOLUTION
The large scale automation project for Pets at Home was implemented in a phased approach, to help alleviate pressures on the warehouse and allow benefit to be realised earlier for the customer.
Phase 1: Pets Pharma
The first phase of the project focused on system process changes and mechanising the picking and packing process for the SQP orders.
Pets at Home offers a subscription service, enabling customers to purchase a subscription to pet flea, tick and worm treatment, for example, and have this delivered to their door every month.
Solution Features
- Enhancing the segregation process based on order-type to allow streamlined automation.
- Reducing errors and ensuring higher accuracy of fulfillment to set new industry standards.
- Allow an increase in product variation on repeat subscription items to help meet more customers’ needs.
Intelligent Technology
Installation of conveyors that route, pack and sort product. Diversify container picking based on the nature of the order, type of SKU and automate packing through multiple packaging material selections.
Smart Software
Technology advancements and seamless interaction between JDA WMS and imio, which processes higher volumes of orders without any bottlenecks.
Results
300%
increase in throughput
Higher level of accuracy, user accountability and alleviation of staffing pressures.
88,000
orders packed per week
Pets at Home saved thousands of pounds, negating the risk associated with complex changes to its existing WMS
Clients who placed their trust in us
Breathe Technologies has a breadth of experience and offer, which meant we could design and implement a solution to select the right product, to meet this niche process. The SQP process that we have designed with this mechanisation is the only one in the industry that runs like this, ensuring we can operate with really high levels of accuracy.
Terry Siddle,
Director of Logistics & Distribution,
Pets at Home
Would you like to speak with one of our team?
Phase 2: Ecommerce orders
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, greatly improved the units per hour packed, per colleague.
Solution features:
- Improving customer order packing processes to increase throughput, efficiency and accuracy.
- Upfront containerisation and shipment creation.
- Reduce the amount of time each order takes to pack upto 300%.
- Fully automated packing.
- Reducing the number of mixed orders across all general B2C eCommerce items.