Now, robots are handling your orders

Through our rapid growth, our logistic capacities were approaching their limits. Having completed the expansion of our main warehouse in Wohlen (Aargau), we’re now ready to double our shipping volume in the coming years.

We’ve expanded our warehouse space from 36,000 to 46,500 square metres – that’s almost seven times the size of a football pitch. And we’ve built upwards, too: a more than 5,000 m2 large new building features a 18 metres tall, fully automated high-bay storage system for medium-sized items. Eleven robots are whizzing around fetching our customer’s orders and passing them on to a similarly sized area where these items are collected and packed.

We’ve also converted an existing former steel foundry hall into a three-storey building where our employees collect smaller items such as wristwatches and T-shirts from shelves and pass them on to a conveyor belt where they’re taken to the packing department. «16,000 square metres of our main warehouse are now fully and semi-automated», Johannes Cramer, Digitec Galaxus COO, explains. What remains manual work is handling large, bulky goods such as sofas and TVs.

Larger range and faster availability

«Modernising our warehouse allows us to make better use of the space we have and our employees don’t need to cover as much distance», Johannes Cramer adds. Although this increases the efficiency of the logistics department, no jobs are at stake – quite the contrary. «We’re more productive, but we also receive a lot more orders», he explains. “Therefore, we’re even planning to recruit more employees.” Digitec Galaxus AG currently has about 1,100 employees, 300 of which work in the logistics department in Wohlen.

What this means for digitec and Galaxus customers is that the range of products that are available within one working day is much larger: Today, up to 1,5 million items can be processed on over 100 km shelving. That’s twice as many as before the warehouse expansion. While capacity of in-stock items used to be about 80,000, between 200,000 to 300,000 items will be available from our warehouse in the future. «We’re ready for the coming years», Cramer concludes.