About
This company is one of the largest grocery and pharmaceutical retailers in the United States, operating more than 2,200 stores and serving over 36 million customers each week.
The Challenge
In today’s healthcare supply chain, speed and accuracy are critical. The customer needed to improve how prescriptions were sorted and distributed to more than 200 retail locations.
Their existing manual sorting process was labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to errors. Pharmacists and store personnel were spending valuable time handling prescription sorting tasks instead of focusing on patient care and customer service.
The company also needed a solution capable of supporting centralized fulfillment operations while enabling rapid replenishment to stores without requiring large amounts of on-site inventory.
The Solution
Tompkins Robotics deployed a tSort robotic sortation system in just seven months from purchase order to go-live.
The solution features a compact 17,000-square-foot footprint with two tSortLift dual induction stations, capable of processing up to 1,000 units per hour.
From each induction station, prescription orders can be dynamically sorted to more than 200 store totes without requiring pre-sorting or fixed routing limitations commonly associated with traditional sortation systems.
The flexibility and speed of the tSort system enabled the customer to centralize prescription fulfillment and ship directly to stores for next-day replenishment in most cases.
Because the system is fully modular and built without fixed infrastructure, it can be easily expanded, reconfigured, or relocated as operational needs evolve. The customer has since deployed tSort across three separate facilities and can shift robots between sites to balance throughput and demand.
The Value