From Ground-Breaking to Breaking Ground: Walmart Begins to Scale Local Fulfillment Centers
Walmart Newsroom | January 27, 2021
Using the competitive advantage of their stores, Walmart introduces their transformation for pickup and delivery efficiencies. Walmart is scaling the number of stores that will also serve as local fulfillment centers. A local fulfillment center (LFC) is a compact, modular warehouse built within, or added to, a store.
To fulfill orders, automated bots retrieve the items from within the fulfillment center. The items are then brought to a picking workstation, where the order can be quickly assembled. While the system retrieves the order, a personal shopper handpicks fresh items like produce, meat and seafood, and large general merchandise from the sales floor.
Once the order is collected, the system stores it until it’s ready for pickup. This whole process can take just a few minutes from the time the order is placed to the time it’s ready for a customer or delivery driver to collect.
The pilot program started in 2019 and Walmart will now be building local fulfillment centers with various technology partners, including Alert Innovation, Dematic and Fabric to test different orientations and add-on innovations to understand what works best.