Tompkins Robotics
About Shoppers Drug Mart
Canada's Leading Pharmacy Retailer
Shoppers Drug Mart is Canada's leading retail pharmacy chain. Founded in 1962, Shoppers Drug Mart has more than 1,300 pharmacist-owned stores in ten provinces and two territories.
The Challenge
Speed, Accuracy, and Safety in Large-Scale Prescription Fulfillment
Prescription fulfillment in retail pharmacy demands both rapid turnaround and uncompromising accuracy. Shoppers Drug Mart needed to manage high script volumes, persistent demand fluctuations, and tight turnaround expectations while maintaining patient safety. Workforce shortages added even more pressure, making it difficult to keep pace with order fulfillment, verification, and quality checks.
On top of this, pharmacies must ensure error-free routing to the correct store or patient—all while capturing detailed tracking data for compliance and chain of custody. These demands make the fulfillment process both labor-intensive and highly error-sensitive. To overcome these challenges, Shoppers Drug Mart needed a sortation system that could streamline and accelerate central fill operations without compromising the accuracy or safety of prescription orders across hundreds of stores.
The Solution
Tompkins Robotics tSortMini
Shoppers Drug Mart selected the Tompkins Robotics tSortMini to sort pharmaceutical orders. tSortMini works like the standard tSort system but uses a more compact platform with smaller robots, specifically designed to handle small items like prescriptions, and efficiently sort them from induction stations to destination totes.
At tSortMini induction stations, operators simply scan and place prescriptions onto a tSortMini robot tray—without needing to think about which station to use, which of the 447 stores the item is going to, or which SKU belongs in which order. No presorting is required.
Every unit is scanned and tracked within the system, ensuring each item is routed to the correct destination tote. Because any prescription can automatically be sent to any destination tote in the system, Shoppers Drug Mart dramatically boosted throughput while maintaining the high accuracy essential for safe, reliable prescription fulfillment.
The modular system requires no heavy equipment like conveyors or fixed tracks. It was installed in just a few months, and throughput was easily scaled by adding more robots—without any additional equipment installation slowing operations.
Following the success of the initial rollout, Shoppers Drug Mart has expanded to 10 tSortMini systems across 6 sites, including the addition of tSort3D.
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