Apotea expands its automated warehouse solution with SSI SCHAEFER

Apotea, Sweden’s first full-scale online pharmacy, commissioned SSI SCHAEFER to expand the existing warehouse solution to cover the increased demand. The company is well known for adopting the innovations presented on the market. In recent years, Apotea has built an environmentally friendly logistics center and installed an automated system from SSI SCHAEFER to keep up with rapid growth. With the new warehouse solution, the fast-growing online pharmacy will be able to ship around 700,000 packages a month.

The online pharmacist was awarded as Sweden’s most favorite online store and is highly valued by customers for fast deliveries, fair prices, and a great customer experience. To ensure the same customer experience in the future, Apotea continues to work together with SSI SCHAEFER to develop and optimize their supply chain.

In 2019, SSI SCHAEFER already developed and implemented an automatic picking solution with an A-Frame for Apotea. It enables rapid processing of complex orders, even under peak loads. Due to the fact, that refilling, and picking are separate processes, the A-Frame is refilled in low-load times and then perform the picking fully automatically at peak times. This means optimum personnel utilization in the warehouse, low error rates, and a significantly enhanced performance. The system was fully installed in fall 2019 but due to Apotea’s rapid growth it is time for an expansion of the system to almost double the performance.

“We´re very satisfied with the existing A-Frame and the way it efficiently has expanded our capacity”, says Pär Svärdson, CEO at Apotea. “That's why we continue to implement a new automated solution together with SSI SCHAEFER and I am really looking forward to seeing our new, even faster A-Frame in action.”

The existing A-Frame system at Apotea can store up to 1,500 products and provides a picking capacity of up to 1,400 orders per hour. This will soon be supported by another A-Frame, which will process 1,000 more orders per hour. The system will be up and running during 2021.

Apotea, Sweden’s first full-scale online pharmacy, commissioned SSI SCHAEFER to expand the existing warehouse solution to cover the increased demand.