June 15, 2023 – Cardinal Health announced its plans to build a new distribution center in the Greenville, South Carolina, area, to support its at-Home Solutions business, a market-leading home healthcare medical supplies provider serving people with chronic and serious health conditions in the United States.
At approximately 350,000 square feet, the new building will provide at-Home Solutions with the space and automation it needs to serve its existing customers and patients while allowing for business expansion. The new facility is at-Home Solutions 11th distribution center nationwide, estimated to bring up to 200 job opportunities to the Greenville region over the next two years.
While the distribution center has the capability to support all 50 states, its primary focus will be customers located in the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri and Louisiana. Once operational, it will ship approximately 8,000 packages per day directly to patient homes. The business currently ships approximately 55,000 packages per day from its 10 sites.
Advanced automation technology and robotics within the facility, including outbound conveyor automation and state-of-the-art warehouse management systems, will further increase inventory capacity and improve service levels for the business so the right products can be at the right place at the right time.
This will be the second Cardinal Health distribution center to feature AutoStore empowered by Swisslog, the fastest order fulfillment system per square foot in the market.
The AutoStore solution, optimized by Swisslog’s SynQ software, employs autonomous robots that move on top of an aluminum cubic grid to continuously pick up, rearrange and deliver storage bins from the grid directly to connected workstations for order picking and replenishment. The solution combines robotics with artificial intelligence to optimize inventory storage space and accuracy, increase employee productivity and drive efficiencies within daily movement of product. Specific to the new Greenville distribution center, it will provide more than 290,000 cubic feet of storage for over 13,000 SKUs with 76 robots, eight picking stations and three replenishment stations supporting nearly 70,000 bin storage locations.
Additionally, the facility will feature two of the world’s first fully automated erected box systems, called the Packsize X5®. Each system produces 600 ready-to-pack, right-sized erected boxes per hour, bringing more speed to order fulfillment.