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Learn how a global sports retailer transformed fragmented fulfillment across siloed warehouses into a streamlined, unified automation ecosystem.
About Decathlon
A global multi-specialist sports brand catering for everyone from beginners to top athletes, Decathlon is an innovative manufacturer of sporting goods for all skill levels. With over 101,100 teammates and 1,817 stores worldwide, Decathlon and its teams have been working ever since 1976 to make the joys and benefits of sport truly accessible to all.
The Challenge
Decathlon was experiencing rapid growth in both e-commerce and store demand, putting pressure on a warehouse network built for lower volumes and separate fulfillment channels. It became clear they needed to restructure store replenishment to get goods closer to their store fronts and therefore, their customers, and meet the demand.
Decathlon hoped a new, advanced automated solution could make their warehouses more responsive to customer needs and shorten their inventory forecasting timelines so they could store less inventory on hand. Additionally, they wanted to decrease the manual work for their labor force to free up operator time for more meaningful work.
All of this needed to be accomplished across several of their warehouses with minimal deployment disruptions to derive value fast.
To support this transformation, Decathlon partnered with Exotec to design a solution for its warehouses.
The Exotec Solution – Seven Standardized Warehouses Across Europe
Traditionally, warehouse automation solutions are highly customized and only support the functions of the individual warehouse. These systems are often rigid and difficult to modify as business requirements grow.
With Decathlon’s rising demand and warehouse constraints, the brand was looking to outfit seven of its brownfield warehouses in France, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Germany, and Italy with new automation.
Exotec proposed a standardized automation strategy, and designed Skyfleet program, an automated solution framework specifically tailored for Decathlon, to be applied across the warehouse ecosystem. The framework turns each warehouse into a near-identical solution built from modular building blocks and connected via Exotec’s WES, Deepsky®. This solution empowers Decathlon to add and remove subsystems, robots, and capacity as necessary to support demand.
Skypod System Dimensions:
| Robots | Storage Locations | Lines Per Hour | Items Processed Per Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 150-200 | 100,000-125,000 | 3,000-4,000 | 150,000-200,000 |
In each of these sites the full automation of inbound and outbound flows is accomplished via depalletizers, carton openers, RFID tunnels, palletizers, and stretch wrappers, integrated by Exotec.
The Results
By unifying each warehouse within its fulfillment operations with one scalable solution, Decathlon is already seeing good results.
For example, the Northampton warehouse Skyfleet location increased efficiencies across resources. They decreased the number of square meters necessary for preparing orders from 17,000 square meters to just 5,000 square meters, opening up valuable space for storage. They also decreased the number of operators assigned to picking, freeing up operator time for high-value tasks, such as inventory management, and Decathlon feels less pressure for peak season hiring. The impact translates over to the employee experience as well: employees at the warehouse see less day-to-day physical strain, with the average walking distance decreasing from 10km to just 1km a day. By optimizing storage and labor requirements, the warehouse is more efficient, saving cost and time.
These benefits radiate across the whole Skyfleet. In Setúbal, Portugal, the warehouse was able to double the number of orders prepared each day while reducing the time spent picking orders by 60%.
With these increased efficiencies, the Skyfleet program enables Decathlon to increase the number of stores it supplies. In Ferrières-en-Brie, France, they now supply 73 sites compared to the 37 they could supply previously.
Key Benefits
- Faster B2B and B2C Fulfillment: Now, B2B distribution centers feed into their B2C fulfillment centers. Not only does this accelerate order delivery for both store replenishment and e-commerce, but it also enables them to decrease the number of inventory on hand, saving valuable space, time, and cost.
- Minimal Operational Distributions and Accelerated Go-Live: Since the approach to each warehouse was standardized, lessons learned early in the first deployment were then applied to each subsequent deployment to accelerate future go-lives. The last site was delivered from start to finish in 9 months.
- Workforce Support: Skypod robots bring goods directly to operators at ergonomic workstations, allowing them to pick and pack orders without hours of walking and heavy lifting. Additionally, the intuitive nature of the standardized solution enables easy training, streamlining adoption.
- Seamlessly Scales as Business Grows: The modular nature of the solution allows Decathlon to easily adapt the solution to support evolving customer needs and capacity increases. For example, the Ferrières-en-Brie site has added 13 additional robots since go-live to support facility demand. This flexibility prevents the solution from being obsolete in a few years, which often happens with highly customized, bespoke systems.
- One Software Layer: Exotec supports the long-term operations and maintenance of the solution. While each site is locally managed, Decathlon has standardized dashboards via our Warehouse Execution Software, Deepsky, enabling teams to see performance from all sites in the Skyfleet, share best practices, and optimize operations across the entire ecosystem.
Through Decathlon’s Skyfleet program, the brand transformed its European warehouse network into a connected, scalable fulfillment ecosystem. Store replenishment can now operate through a unified system that adapts to changing demand while maintaining speed, reliability, and operational efficiency.
Want to see Skyfleet program in action? Visit our Exotour page to find a site near you.