IN Brief:
- Luterbach distribution centre has gone live with more than 100 Skypod robots and roughly 174,000 storage locations.
- Goods-to-person automation targets peak-handling for store replenishment and e-commerce order profiles.
- The system is designed to scale throughput without a linear increase in manual picking labour.
Dosenbach-Ochsner AG has brought an Exotec Skypod system into live operation at its Luterbach logistics site in northwestern Switzerland, deploying more than 100 robots to automate pick and pack flows across approximately 174,000 storage locations. The implementation is part of a wider shift towards omnichannel fulfilment capability, as retailers face a more volatile mix of store replenishment, online orders, and short-notice promotional spikes that are difficult to absorb with fixed manual capacity.
The Luterbach facility is intended to support demand across nearly 380 Dosenbach, Ochsner Shoes, and Ochsner Sport stores in Switzerland, alongside expanding e-commerce volumes. Dosenbach-Ochsner, part of the DEICHMANN Group, has positioned the project as a future-proofing move, responding to the operational friction that appears when legacy intralogistics is asked to serve both high-frequency single-item picking and store-oriented case or tote preparation from the same inventory base.
“E-commerce places very different demands on intralogistics than brick-and-mortar retail,” said Gregor Oberfranz, Head of Logistics at Dosenbach-Ochsner AG. “This becomes especially clear when it comes to managing sudden surges in demand. With Exotec, we now have the flexibility and capacity to handle these peaks seamlessly.”
Skypod is a goods-to-person approach, using autonomous mobile robots to retrieve bins from racking and feed them to pick and pack workstations, reducing walk time and smoothing labour utilisation during peaks. For retailers operating tight delivery promises, the technology’s main value is often not maximum headline throughput, but the ability to protect service levels when demand diverges from forecast and labour availability is constrained.
Project advisory support was provided by Miebach Consulting Switzerland. Exotec said the system is already exceeding initial performance expectations following go-live, implying that the site has moved beyond commissioning and into normal operating rhythm — a stage where order profiles, SKU velocity, and exception handling start to define the true operating cost and service performance.
For the DEICHMANN Group, which operates in more than 30 countries and runs both physical stores and online shops, automation at a national hub can also play a network role: stabilising upstream store replenishment cycles, reducing backlogs that spill into outbound cut-off times, and lowering exposure to late-line congestion when e-commerce volumes surge.
“We are proud to support Dosenbach-Ochsner with our Skypod System,” said Andreas Stöckl, eVP Sales Central Europe at Exotec. “It is particularly rewarding to see how quickly the benefits have become visible following go-live.”
