Promoted content: Ocado Engineering - delivering innovation in grocery retail

At the core of the Ocado operational model sits centralised fulfilment, a concept where grocery orders are picked, packed and shipped to customers in one hour slots from a highly-automated facility called a Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC).

Designing, delivering and sustaining the cutting-edge engineering and construction solutions to power these CFCs is Ocado Engineering, a division of the Ocado Group. In addition to underpinning the operations of Ocado.com, Ocado Engineering work on the automation fulfilment products that form an integral part of the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), an end-to-end platform designed to power all aspects of a grocery e-commerce business. Recent adopters of OSP include Groupe Casino, a leading French retailer, and Sobeys, the second largest food retailer in Canada.

A typical OSP CFC includes two modular grids where thousands of robots work collaboratively across two temperature regimes (ambient and chilled) to assemble the items needed for a customer order in five minutes. In order to construct, fit-out and maintain these facilities, Ocado Engineering relies on three departments: Buildings Technology, Automation Engineering, and Engineering Operations.