Ocado are offering a vision of the future - with all of the promise and challenges that entails. The Hatfield warehouse is enormous and is one of the two where Ocado assembles shopping orders. The other even larger warehouse is in Tamworth, which together with Hatfield enables the company’s delivery network to cover 70% of the country. Hatfield apparently processes 1.5 million items every day - and it was all being operated by what felt like a tiny number of people. The main feature of the warehouse is a 25km long network of conveyors which are used to transport different coloured tote boxes around the building. Green boxes contain stock - and red boxes contain people’s shopping. And they share tracks - and it is by using barcodes and some complex software, they can be directed to wherever they need to be.The big optimisation challenge for Ocado is making sure that the right boxes arrive in the right places at the right time.
