Spanish grocery retail giant Alcampo, which belongs to Auchan, has started operating its first Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC). Located in the municipality of San Fernando de Henares, 15 kilometres east of the Spanish capital Madrid, the logistics centre uses automation technology from Ocado. At full capacity, around one thousand of the British specialist supplier’s proprietary robotic systems will help to prepare up to 70,000 customer orders from the greater Madrid area every week.
The fulfilment centre built by Prologis covers an area of 27,000 square metres and has 36 loading and unloading bays. Service provider Salvesen Logistica employs more than 400 people at the site for picking, packing and delivery. The official opening ceremony will be organised by the retailer in September.
With the commissioning of the CFC, Alcampo has completed its ‘Digital Proximity’ project with Ocado, started in 2021. The Auchan Group company invested a total of
19.4 million euros, aiming leadership in Spanish omnichannel grocery retail. The retailer reached two further milestones in the project relaunching its online shopping website www.alcampo.es and rolling out Ocado’s in-store fulfilment software ISF nationwide in 2022.
AI helps to pick faster and more precisely
The centre piece of Ocado’s CFC automation technology is a grid called ‘The Hive’, under which the individual products are stored in totes. A fleet of bots transports these close to a robot arm, the On-Grid Robotic Pick (OGRP). This sucks up items required for the respective order and packs them into bags. The system uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to precisely pick and pack items of different sizes, shapes and textures. The manufacturer claims to be able to process orders of 50 items in five minutes. As other Ocado installations in food retail show, the system can pick more than 70 per cent of an extensive food range without human intervention.
Loading of delivery vehicles is also largely automated. The technology, known as Automated Frameload (AFL), packs the containers assembled by the robot arm into stable transport boxes and loads them onto frames in the delivery vehicle without human intervention.
