Carrefour: Reims, France

About Carrefour

Carrefour is a fast-growing multinational retail and wholesaling corporation, operating a chain of over 12,225 hypermarkets, grocery stores, and convenience stores in more than 30 countries. As of January 2023, Carrefour is the world’s eighth-largest retailer by revenue.

The Challenge

During 2019, Carrefour’s micro-fulfilment center in Reims, France experienced the “good” problem that both excites and scares many fulfillment warehouses: rapid growth. Until then, the facility had operated with a manual picking operation for fulfilling thousands of daily e-Commerce orders for curbside delivery. However, rapid growth and increasing demand for same-day, error-free orders compelled Carrefour to seek an automated solution to improve the facility’s operational performance and capacity while maintaining a high degree of flexibility. The smooth fulfilment and replenishment of more than 63,000 SKUs during routine as well as a multitude of varying peak periods throughout each year was a top priority. A system that could efficiently utilize their warehouse’s limited space was also important to Carrefour.

The Solution

Results

1. Plug & Play Modularity

• Installed in just six weeks with minimal disruption to on-going operations thanks to the experience gained from its three sister systems at other Carrefour sites

• System ready for quick and easy expansion with ability to add robots within minutes

2. Improved Customer Satisfaction

• Raised picking reliability rate to 99%

• Ability to access any SKU in the system within two minutes to service urgent order requests for fast shipping

3. Increased Efficiency 

• Utilized entire height of warehouse to increase storage density and SKU quantity 
• Drastically reduced lead times for curbside pickup orders through partial order preparation in consolidation with chilled items that are manually picked in-store