Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Retail Technologies, 2024
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Apotek Hjärtat is Sweden’s largest pharmacy chain, with nearly 400 pharmacies and over 4,000 employees. Its ambition is to give each customer better health and well-being through more personalized service, a wider range and expanded services while developing the pharmacy of the future.
To help it deliver on its vision, Hjärtat deployed G2P automation and advanced WES software to improve picking operations at its facilities. We chatted with team members ranging from the CEO to operators to find out more about the solution and why they implemented it.
Monika Magnusson, CEO
The Swedish pharmacy retail in e-comm is highly competitive, and you need to be both swift and efficient at the same time and also of course precise, since it’s pharmacy we’re talking about. We’ve recently piloted new types of automation in our e-comm warehouse in Norrköping and this has enabled us to actually go forward towards a higher capacity.
Klas Pettersson, Head of Supply Chain
The goods-to-person system from GreyOrange is reducing the walking distance that each person has to do in the warehouse during the picking process, making it a lot better for the environment and for the people. We also see higher picking quality and a reduced number of errors compared to the normal process. We see that we are increasing productivity in terms of picked order lines per hour. We are close to doubling that compared to the manual process that we ran beside the pilot.
Anas, Operator/Picker
Before the automation and the robots, we were picking manually with scanners — picking the items and going on long walks to get the customers’ orders ready. But now that we have automation, it is much easier. We have the robots bringing the items to us and we are picking with the help of the lights and we know that every customer is in the right place. Now we pick the items with the help of the new technique that we have. It’s a very big Improvement
Anton A., Team Leader – Inbound Ops
Before, every member of the staff needed to make a lot of decisions every time — where to put things or how to do it as efficiently as possible. Since we started with automation, there are a lot fewer decisions to take and you get a lot more help from the system on how to work in an efficient way.
Sebastian Almqvist, System Engineer
The big difference is the ergonomic part. We have seen that the operators really like the fact that they don’t have to walk around in the warehouse anymore, that they can be standing on these platforms where we have also added some extra cushion. We have also seen that GreyMatter focuses on putting highly popular products in ergonomic fields in the MSU in regard to height and depth. I also think it’s a very good system for getting to know the inventory balance and a really good view of our inventory. The AI helps us to keep picking and completing the right orders that need to leave the house first, and it also helps us to monitor and see how many PPSs (pick put stations) we need to have open to staff at different times during the day depending on how our order pool looks.
Monika Magnusson
The whole project with the automation really has involved the various parts of Hjärtat and, as we always try to involve everyone as much as we can, we decided to have a competition where everyone could name a robot if they wanted as long as their suggestion followed a certain theme — and that theme was superheroes.
Sebastian Almqvist
My personal favorite is a superhero called Pippi Långstrump, who is a girl that has super strength, and I think that symbolizes the robots very well — they lift quite a large amount of weight and they deliver those MSUs without any doubt.
Anas
When you call for a superhero they come to you and save you, right? I see some similarities when the robots are coming for us, the pickers, and we see the items come in — that saves the day for us. In the beginning, we were all excited about learning a new way of picking the items using a new system; we were intrigued. And then we got to learn the system, and overall the satisfaction is nice and the workers are very happy. At the end of the day, it makes everything easier, and we understand that and we are happy about it.
Peter Skarin, Head of IT Logistics and Automation
Implementing a completely new technology in a business that is in full production means many challenges. With the help of a fantastic project team and product support from GreyOrange, we have managed to find ways to tackle and then process solutions, which meant that we could start production a few days earlier than planned.
Monika Magnusson
What we’ve experienced so far truly has exceeded our expectations when it comes to collaboration. We feel that we have had a lot of attention and that the title “Customer Success Manager” really applies to the collaboration that we’ve seen so far, which feels great.
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Klas Pettersson
One key element of working and choosing to work with GreyOrange was their software, GreyMatter. We believe it’s a very good, solid platform to work with. First of all, it’s very intelligent — working with AI, improving and optimizing processes — but it’s also open for us to use other technology in terms of automation if we believe that we have a fit with another supplier. We can still use GreyMatter as the platform to continue to work with and expand our business.
Another part of GreyMatter, which we feel will be interesting for us in the future, is the possibility of doing order orchestration, using our pharmacies as nodes in our supply chain and using GreyMatter to distribute the demand all over it. It’s very, very interesting for us to explore and work more with down the road.
Monika Magnusson
When choosing who to partner with there were a few things that were really important to us. One, of course, was the scalability because how fast the e-comm market would grow was still uncertain. Another one was innovation — we wanted someone to inspire us. And, thirdly, we wanted a good collaboration with someone who really wanted us to succeed. And we feel that we’ve found that partner.