Decathlon automates 7 European warehouses with Exotec robots

Exotec, a French warehouse robotics company, has completed a seven-site automation rollout for sporting goods retailer Decathlon across five European countries, announcing the program at the LogiMAT trade show in Munich on March 24.

The deployment – branded as the Skyfleet program – covers facilities in France, the UK, Portugal, Italy and Germany. It marks a significant expansion of a partnership that began in 2021, when Decathlon installed its first robotic system at a warehouse in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

One architecture, seven sites

Each Skyfleet warehouse is built around a standardized configuration: a fleet of 150 to 200 autonomous Skypod robots, between 100,000 and 125,000 storage positions, and a system-level throughput capacity of 3,000 to 4,000 order lines per hour. The robots operate on a goods-to-person model, delivering storage bins directly to fixed picking stations rather than requiring workers to move through warehouse aisles. The Skypod units can also climb vertical racking to heights of up to 14 meters, enabling higher storage density within the same floor footprint.

All flow orchestration and equipment coordination across the seven sites runs through Deepsky – Exotec’s proprietary warehouse execution system (WES). Adopting a common architecture made it possible to develop a single software codebase for all seven facilities, reducing both deployment time and ongoing maintenance overhead.

Alongside the Skypod robots, each site integrates automated depalletizers, carton-opening machines, RFID (radio-frequency identification) tunnels and palletizers sourced and specified by Exotec in its role as end-to-end integrator — a standardization that has also generated cost and procurement efficiencies across the program.

Orders doubled, walking distances cut by 90 percent

Performance data published alongside the announcement points to significant operational gains. Decathlon’s Setúbal facility in Portugal has doubled its daily order preparation capacity, rising from 57,000 to 114,000 orders per day. The site also expanded the number of stores it serves, from 41 to 73. The Ferrières warehouse in France achieved a comparable increase in store coverage, going from 37 stores to 73.

At the Northampton site in the UK, pickers now walk approximately one kilometer per day, compared to more than 10 kilometers previously – a reduction of over 90 percent. Workplace incident rates at that facility have also halved.

During peak periods, robots can be redeployed between sites, providing capacity flexibility that fixed infrastructure cannot replicate. Ferrières has already expanded its fleet by 13 additional units since the initial deployment.