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WAREHOUSING, HANDLING & STORAGE
PRIME VISION ROBOTS HELP BABYDUMP TAKE FIRST STEPS IN AUTOMATED ORDER PICKING
With 134 million babies born globally in 2023, demand for baby products is high. This birth rate, combined with the rise of e-commerce, has forced suppliers to rapidly expand. To alleviate its growing pains, Babydump, a leading European retailer of baby products, automated its order picking operations at Sint-Oedenrode in the Netherlands to increase throughput and sustainability. For efficiently moving orders through the facility, it relies on 12 autonomous guided robots (AGRs) from Prime Vision.
B
abydump is part of the FTH group and was founded in the 1970s as a retailer of baby products. It’s now market leader in its segment with a thriving online operation and 14 stores
throughout the Netherlands and Belgium. The business offers baby rooms, prams, car seats, buggies, high chairs, baby clothing and many more baby essentials. Experiencing rapid growth and looking to meet new environmental legislation, Babydump searched for ways to improve the efficiency and sustainability of its order picking operations. At its site in Sint-Oedenrode, online orders and stock deliveries for its stores were picked manually by employees.
OPTIMISING PICKING AND PACKAGING Having reached the limits of this set up, Babydump installed an automatic storage and retrieval system (ASRS) from Autostore to streamline the process. The ASRS holds 15,000 crates containing specific items. Instead of employees travelling along the racks, the system delivers the correct items for each
order directly to a picking station, allowing workers to easily pack products. With regards to sustainability, Babydump
worked on optimising its packaging. Instead of relying on standard box sizes that rarely matched the volume of the shipment, the company purchased two box erector machines. These produce two different types of boxes, which once packed by employees at the picking station, are cut to the exact size of the order and fitted with a lid by box closing machines. This minimises wasted space and improves sustainability. The order then travels via chutes to the conveyors, which sort it for dispatch to a particular store, route or delivery service.
ROBOTS CONNECT THE DOTS However, the success of the system relied on efficiently moving boxes between all the different machines, picking stations, conveyors and chutes. There were other complications too. Beyond the ASRS, prams and other non- machinable products that can’t be handled by automation needed to be accommodated in a different process flow. Furthermore, the facility handles both online and store orders.
Supporting 14 physical locations as well as e- commerce customers added more complexity. Clearly, static conveyors would be unable to accommodate these multiple demands, so a more flexible solution was required. Following discussions with the supplier of the ASRS, Babydump approached Prime Vision to provide a fleet of 12 robots and an additional spare to support the newly automated facility. Based in the Netherlands, Prime Vision is a global supplier of automation, computer vision and robotics technology for the logistics sector. It currently operates over 700 robots at customer facilities around the world. Its local
14 JUNE 2024 | FACTORY&HANDLINGSOLUTIONS
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