APONEO is one of the top ten mail-order pharmacies in Germany, serving 850,000 customers. It offers a range of 140,000 products, including prescription and non-prescription medication, food supplements, contact lenses, body care products and cosmetics. The online pharmacy’s warehouse ships 4,000 parcels every day.
The company’s rapid growth made automating certain logistics processes an urgent priority. Therefore, in March 2013, APONEO decided to introduce an innovative solution from SSI Schaefer for inspecting and sorting batches.
APONEO’s goal was high-speed, high-volume sorting of products supplied by pharmaceutical wholesalers. This was achieved by implementing batch picking and automated inspection when sorting items during the goods receiving process. SSI Schaefer’s solution is based on a two-stage picking process that is considerably more efficient than the original method.
During the first picking stage, deliveries from the wholesalers are pre-sorted into manageable batches. The products are then automatically segregated on a conveyor belt, and fed to Schaefer’s special scanner unit. The scanner’s vision system captures and documents each product from all sides. Then the items are moved by suspended bins to twelve shafts used to fill containers waiting below. This configuration allows as many as 4,500 items to be sorted per hour.
The second picking stage consists of sorting the products into individual patient orders. To this end, the pre-sorted batches are loaded onto platform trucks and moved to the shipping area. There, they are temporarily stored in one of six shelving systems before being sent to the customer.
“The goods receiving process was definitely our biggest weakness. Our new inspection and sorting solution has cut turnaround time in half, and helped us achieve a 100 per cent order accuracy rate. Additionally, we are now prepared for the documentation and tracking requirements of the upcoming EU Falsified Medicines Directive,” states Patrick Luig, Technical Director at APONEO.
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