a temperature-controlled healthcare distribution facility serving cold-chain and ambient medical products
How a Healthcare Fulfillment Hub Raised Pick Lines 54% With AMRs
See how a healthcare distribution site raised pick lines 54% in six months and cut cart push-pull injuries by deploying autonomous mobile robots in ambient and cooler zones.
- 54%
- More lines
- 6 mo
- After launch
- 24
- AMR fleet
- 10k
- Steps before
Based on a documented real-world deployment. Figures are from public reporting; the organization is not named.
Cart miles and injury risk in regulated picking
A healthcare distribution facility processes ambient products alongside cooler storage held between two and eight degrees Celsius. Before automation, associates used scan guns and pushed multi-shelf metal carts through long pick paths, averaging about ten thousand steps in a single shift.
Leadership wanted higher throughput without adding push-pull injuries that had already shown up in injury logs. They also needed traceability that ties each pick to an associate record inside the warehouse management system for regulated products.
- Manual carts drove extreme daily walking distances
- Push-pull injuries were a recurring safety issue
- Cold zones required compliant product handling and tracking
Fleet AMRs with warehouse execution software
The operation deployed a warehouse execution platform and a fleet of twenty-four autonomous mobile robots with dashboards for operational reporting. Robots meet associates at pick locations so people focus on accurate selection instead of cart pushing through ambient and cooler areas.
Bots move through an automatic door into the cooler, pick up staged product, and return to ambient processing while the system logs associate and item data for historical traceability in the WMS. Industrial engineering teams modeled the layout after seeing a similar deployment at another site before scaling it to healthcare SKUs.
- Deploy execution software and AMR fleet across ambient and cooler
- Stage picks so robots travel aisles instead of associates pushing carts
- Capture pick and associate data for WMS traceability
Throughput and safety gains in six months
Within six months of launch, leadership reported a 54 percent increase in lines picked, helping the site deliver orders faster while holding accuracy and quality checks. Associates no longer push heavy carts for mile-long loops, and push-pull injuries that had been common largely disappeared from the safety record.
Cold-chain workflows kept running because robots handled the temperature transitions associates used to make while manually shuttling carts. The same fleet serves both ambient and cooler picks without separate manual processes for each zone.
What this pattern means for healthcare distributors
Regulated healthcare fulfillment often hits the same wall: accurate picking with cart miles that beat up associates and slow throughput. Service Robot Co. stays vendor neutral, matches AMR fleets to aisle layout and temperature zones, and supports monthly robot rental or phased rollout before capital approval.
Integration, training, WMS coordination, and nationwide service stay with one partner so operations and quality teams are not juggling separate vendors for finance and repair. A free site assessment can map whether pick-side AMRs fit your ambient and cooler footprint.
