With customer demand escalating faster than ever before, e-commerce retailers and manufacturers need to find more effective, less expensive intralogistics without adding more personnel.

Filling orders can often be the most labour-intensive and costly activity for warehouses, where the cost of order picking is estimated to be as much as 55% of the total operating expenses. This is typically the case in traditional, labour-operated warehouses using pallets, cases, and pieces. In fact, a picker’s travel time between receiving, picking, and transporting items to shipping can account for as much as 60-65% of a facility’s direct labour activities.

Med24 is an e-commerce company focused on health, beauty, and medical needs. It specialises in wellbeing products. It aims to give customers an excellent shopping experience by offering low prices, fast delivery, and the broadest selection of products in the Nordic countries. Growing over 400 % in the past three years and with more than 10,000 products in stock, the company uses automated storage and retrieval systems from Kardex Remstar to guarantee cost efficiency, maximum speed, and customer satisfaction.

Med24 employs 50 people, including pharmacy assistants, dieticians, and beauticians who give professional advice to their customers. Additionally, 25 people work in the 1,200 m2 warehouse, handling orders and incoming goods. During a typical working day, the Med24 picking team handles about 4,500 order lines (with approx. 1,500 orders and three lines per order). With the number of articles steadily growing by 15 % annually, inventory reached over 10,000 items, and the warehouse became too small to store, pick, and pack the products in stock efficiently. The company needed to find ways to optimise their floor space, keep their productivity up, and delivery times down. To stay ahead of the game, they started looking for solutions that would use their square meters in the best possible manner.

In order to increase the warehouse capacity of Med24, Kardex Remstar installed six Kardex Megamat RS 350 Vertical Carousels. Three months later, they installed three more. “This kind of scalability is essential to us. Knowing that we can add machines through a smooth process gives us great flexibility as we continue to grow,” says Nils K. Træholt, owner and director at Med24.

Thanks to the automated storage system, Med24 have optimised their floor space by storing 90 % of their products (9,000 articles) in a 200 m2 picking area. The warehouse management software Power Pick Global with the colour picking option has allowed them to increase their efficiency, picking up to 50 orders simultaneously and reducing picking time by 60 %. The ease of use has also contributed to quick training of new staff, reaching full picking speed after only 2-3 hours on the job (compared to 2-3 months). “The Megamat RS 350 has proven to be the perfect storage solution for us. Excellent space utilisation and high efficiency have made our business much more competitive,” Nils K. Træholt concludes.

Kardex has created The Six steps to optimising ecommerce order fulfilment this white paper is dedicated to looking at best practices within order fulfilment. To learn more about the automation and faster picking click here or contact Kardex Remstar at info.remstar.uk@kardex.com or visit the website.