Four sites, one standard needed
Two Swedish warehouses, one in Poland and one in the USA each ran their own way. Without a shared system, best practice couldn't travel between sites and every improvement had to be reinvented locally.
Customer story • Multisite warehousing
Hultafors Group needed WMS that holds four sites together
Hultafors Group runs a portfolio of tools and workwear brands from four warehouses spread across Sweden, Poland and the USA. The challenge wasn't one warehouse; it was making four of them, on two continents and in three time zones, run their warehouse automation on the same logic.
“Bitlog is incredibly easy to use. I haven't come across systems that are as simple and user-friendly.”
Nicklas Axell
Group Logistics Director, Hultafors Group
About Nordic nest
As Hultafors Group grew across brands and borders, its warehouses had to run as one operation
Hultafors Group is a European tools and workwear company built around brands that tradespeople know well, including Snickers Workwear, Hultafors Tools, Solid Gear, Hellberg Safety and CLC Work Gear. Those brands ship from four warehouses: two in Sweden (Nässjö and Olsfors), one in Poland (Szczecin) and one in the USA (Milwaukee, Wisconsin).
Each site serves a different mix of customers, from small, frequent European deliveries to large orders for North American retailers. As the group expanded, running each warehouse on its own logic stopped scaling, and the operation needed a single system that could handle every site without flattening what made each one different.
The Solution
One automated brain for four warehouses
Hultafors Group chose Bitlog WMS because it could do the hard part, coordinating automation and manual work in one flow, without being hard to use on the floor. In Poland, Bitlog WMS orchestrates AutoStore, transport systems and dispatch as a single operation, consolidating orders and running customized value-added services in the same flow. It was the site's first AutoStore installation, and Bitlog was the brain that tied the robots, conveyors and picking together.
The same system then scaled to the group's other warehouses. In the USA, the Milwaukee facility replaced three previous warehouses and moved onto Bitlog WMS alongside the rest of the group, so four sites now run on one platform. In Sweden, the smaller Nässjö and Olsfors warehouses use Bitlog's mobile app to prioritize picking. What sealed it was that the same system worked for a fully automated site and a lean manual one without becoming two different products.
Why Hultafors Group runs its warehouse automation on Bitlog WMS
Hultafors Group's warehouse automation now runs as one operation instead of four separate ones: four warehouses in three countries on two continents, all in one Bitlog WMS. Picking errors were all but eliminated, and the Poland site increased pick speed by 200% and tripled its daily capacity from 1,000 to 3,000 order lines by orchestrating AutoStore, conveyors and manual picking in a single flow.
Because the same system runs a fully automated site and a lean manual one, best practice travels between Sweden, Poland and the USA instead of being reinvented locally. It's a system the floor found easy to learn, which is what let the group scale it across two continents.
With every warehouse on one platform, Hultafors Group can keep adding sites, automation and services without adding a new way of working each time.
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