The Challenge
Pharmaceutical fulfillment is difficult to scale because growth, compliance, traceability, and demand volatility must all be managed at the same time. Based in Bensheim, Germany, MSK Pharma Group serves pharmacies, wholesalers, and healthcare customers in a highly regulated environment where fulfillment must support serialization, lot tracking, expiry-date validation, and real-time traceability. Before deploying Locus Robotics, associates relied on manual cart-based picking and extensive travel, creating long walking distances, high travel time, and limits on pick productivity. The challenge was not only to improve picking performance, but to create a more scalable operating model across MSK’s growing warehouse network — supporting growth across multiple facilities, demand shifts between sites, different pharma and e-commerce workflows, fast onboarding and operational adoption, and future warehouse expansion, all without locking the business into fixed automation constraints.
The Solution
MSK’s new, second facility was built to support rapid demand growth. Across both its brownfield and greenfield sites, MSK deployed Locus Robotics incrementally, combining collaborative Locus robots with LocusONE® orchestration to coordinate workflows, labor, and robot movement in real time. Adaptability became one of MSK’s biggest operational advantages: if demand shifts between warehouses, robot fleets can be reassigned between the neighboring facilities in approximately 15 minutes, allowing the operation to respond to changing workload conditions without rebuilding infrastructure or overcommitting fixed capacity.
The Results
With Locus Robotics, MSK was able to deploy automation incrementally and adapt robot capacity across both of its neighboring facilities without disruption. Today the operation runs 63 Locus robots across two sites, processing 55,000+ average daily units and handling 6,400+ average daily order lines.
- Reduced walking and travel time for associates across both facilities
- Higher pick productivity compared with manual cart-based picking
- Faster onboarding and adoption for new associates
- Flexible scaling across facilities, with robot capacity reassigned in approximately 15 minutes
- Improved cartonization and downstream shipping efficiency through pick-to-carton workflows
- Better coordination between picking and packing through system-directed routing to active pack stations
- Adaptive pharmaceutical fulfillment at scale — MSK is preparing for a third warehouse facility planned for 2027 and future evaluation of Locus solutions for additional e-commerce workflows
When we built the Bensheim 2 site, we suddenly had to pick in a month what would previously have taken a year. It was always important to have a solution that is flexible and works well for multiple types of customers. The nice thing about the Locus Robotics system is that if we recognize a peak in a certain warehouse, we can react; not only to deploy more employee capacity but also robots, in order to create a more powerful team.