In recent years, the Bergfreunde company has become one of the European leaders in the e-commerce market for mountain sports. With an increase in online sales of approximately 30%, the German company considered it crucial that this growth also be transferred to its logistics capacity, so it made the decision to bet on Element Logic to install the AutoStore automated storage system.
“With our tremendous growth, we depend on a flexible and efficient storage system, which is why we chose AutoStore,” explains Ronny Höhn, CEO of Bergfreunde, who highlights “scalability, space savings and high performance” as the “ decisive factors” to bet on this system. “All of our expectations for AutoStore and Element Logic have been more than fulfilled and we have never regretted our decision,” says Ronny Höhn.
The data also supports the commitment to Element Logic: Bergfreunde has been able to increase picking efficiency by more than 400% and the waiting time from order to delivery has been reduced to less than 3 hours. The results also guarantee a return on investment, as the warehouse automation project paid for Bergfreunde in less than two years.
A high-density warehouse
Bergfreunde’s logistics at its warehouse south of Stuttgart now relies on 80 robots traversing the 3,000m2 system, moving 94,000 buckets stacked on 16 levels, with a total of 21 ports available to move items in and out of the warehouse. The system currently allows up to 200,000 items to be processed per week, which means that, on average, Bergfreunde operators now complete 175 picks per hour. The magnitude of this improvement is valued much more taking into account the data of picks that were made before Element Logic installed the AutoStore system: 45 per hour.
