Spanish food retail cooperative Consum has switched on an AutoStore system at its new 19,000 sqm distribution centre in Las Torres de Cotillas, near Murcia. The payoff is already on the books: picking productivity for slow-moving dry goods has climbed 40%.
Inside the Deployment
The centre opened a little over a year ago on a €50M investment, and it was already one of Consum’s most automated sites, complete with a 40-metre high-bay automated silo. AutoStore came later, as a separate €6.4M project layered onto that base.
Integrator Smartlog built the grid across 1,140 sqm. It holds 27,100 bins and runs a fleet of 60 robots feeding eight pick stations. At each station an operator handles up to 10 orders at once through a put-to-light setup. Smartlog’s Galys WMS/WCS software runs the operation end to end, and an automated packing machine from Aurrelan, a Smartlog subsidiary, closes out the orders. The system covers roughly 3,000 SKUs and runs 18 hours a day.
Why Consum Automated Its Slow Movers
The targeted items are low-rotation dry goods bound for about 300 stores. They used to be picked by hand at Consum’s Valencia warehouse. Shifting them to goods-to-person handling is what produced the 40% jump, and it landed precisely on the slice of the catalogue that had been the most labour-heavy.
For a cooperative feeding a dense supermarket network, steadier order accuracy and freed-up staff matter as much as raw throughput. How far Consum extends the model across the rest of its estate is the open question now.
