The bakery market is very competitive, and particularly demanding is the distribution of fresh bread. It is a high-volume, low-margin, labor-intensive business - the only way to improve profitability is to lower the costs while improving service levels.

Some of the common characteristics of bread distribution:

• Labor-intensive manual handling
• Very repetitive work with heavy lifting – resulting in high staff turnover and difficulties to recruit in many areas
• Picking accuracy is often a problem with cost penalties resulting from erroneous deliveries
• Multi-shift operation
• Number of SKUs are increasing as are supermarkets’ service level demands
• 3-shift baking operations to be matched with very tight delivery schedules – sometimes several deliveries per day in city areas

All these factors plus the fact that bread baskets (or crates) can be handled and stacked by robot make bread distribution an ideal MultiPick operation.

Cimcorp's MultiPick order picking systems are especially developed for products delivered in plastic and cardboard crates. That's why the MultiPick systems suit very well to the demanding circumstances of industrial bakeries.