How a Pharmacy Brings Three Storage Areas Into One Picking Flow

This large community pharmacy sells non-prescription medicines and parapharmacy products through its own website. Its catalog contains more than 25,000 SKUs, and the team prepares about 200 orders a day with plans to handle twice that volume. Medicines remain in the pharmacy or its nearby storage premises, which explains the separate medicine stock room. Part of the range stays on the shop floor, while most online stock is held in the parapharmacy warehouse where the web team ships orders. The store runs on Magento 2. WinPharma remains the pharmacy management system (LGO) of record for stock, prices, and new products. Patients choose home delivery or collection at the pharmacy, so both flows run side by side. Picking runs from early morning to early afternoon, before the Colissimo pickup.

The Challenge

Picking started from a website list with no shared operational view across the three storage areas. For every shortage, the picker copied product codes into an email to the pharmacy. Three or four shuttles returned in the morning. Checking only the final three digits made similar product references from the same laboratory hard to distinguish before the second check. Colissimo labels required an export and import. At the same time, close to half of orders contained one SKU, sometimes in several units. About one quarter were click-and-collect orders prepared separately at the pharmacy.

The Solution

myFulfillment coordinates reservations, transfers, waves, scans, and shipments around one dock. Its three warehouses match the three physical storage areas. Orders are split by availability into in-stock, partial, and out-of-stock queues. Transfer recommendations from the medicine room and shop floor are handled before picking. Once products arrive at the e-commerce dock, the affected orders become ready to pick without another manual update.

Every web order ships from the e-commerce dock, even when physical stock sits in the medicine room or on the pharmacy floor. A transfer recommendation first covers the orders due to ship. As soon as the transfer is received, a partial order automatically moves into the in-stock queue.

The Results

The morning starts with the transfers needed for open orders, then the team picks only what is available. Missing references no longer travel by email. Each order type has its own wave, so a one-item parcel does not follow the same route as a multi-line basket. At the packing bench, a full CIP13 or EAN13 scan replaces the partial visual check and triggers the label. Shipped orders and click-and-collect bags remain in one tracking flow until they leave with the carrier or the pharmacy shuttle.