Australian automated distribution centres

Woolworths: Auburn Customer Fulfilment Centre

Woolworths invested A$780 million to build semi-automated and fully automated distribution centres in south-west Sydney, replacing its Minchinbury, Yennora and Melbourne national and regional distribution centres, according to trade publication iTnews reporting on the original announcement. Up to 1,300 existing roles were displaced in the process, while roughly 650 new jobs were created at the new sites — the kind of labour outcome that sits at the centre of the whole automation-investment case.

Its Auburn Automated Customer Fulfilment Centre opened on 7 May 2025, later than the originally announced 2024 target, per both Woolworths Group's own media release and independent trade reporting. It's a 22,000 square metre facility, described as increasing Western Sydney online capacity by 50%, handling up to 60,000 online orders a week, picked by more than 600 directly employed staff, stocking around 30,000 products, and running what's described as the largest "Direct to Boot" collection offering in Australia, with 16 bays.

Coles: Witron and Ocado partnerships

Coles is developing automated distribution centres at Redbank, Queensland, and Kemps Creek, New South Wales, in partnership with German automation firm Witron, according to trade and academic reporting including Future Food Systems and The Conversation. Separately, Coles has partnered with UK-based Ocado to build automated customer fulfilment centres at Truganina, Victoria, and Wetherill Park, New South Wales, each reportedly running around 1,000 robots picking and packing online grocery orders.

Dematic AutoStore: WesTrac Tomago and Hallite Perth

Dematic installed an AutoStore grid system for WesTrac's spare-parts distribution centre at Tomago, NSW — installation began in August 2022 and the system went live in June 2023. Per Dematic's own published case study, the installation runs 15,350 bins and 24 robots across four inbound conveyor ports and six goods-to-person picking stations, storing around 80,000 SKUs and handling roughly 40,000 pick lines a week, with the picking rate reported to have risen from around 300 to more than 500 lines per hour, freeing up roughly 1,000 square metres of floor space. Those are the vendor's own reported figures from its case study, including customer testimonials, and no independent audit of them was found in this research.

Dematic's first AutoStore installation in the Australia/New Zealand region was at parts distributor Hallite's warehouse in Perth, Western Australia — a smaller system, around 4,000 totes served by three conveyor ports and four robots, according to trade publication FM Media's reporting on the vendor's announcement.

What this pattern actually shows

Every named project here sits with a very large operator: two of Australia's largest grocery retailers, and a major equipment and parts distributor. That fits the broader picture from this research: Australian automated distribution centre adoption, as publicly reported at the time of writing, is concentrated in a handful of large-scale operators rather than reflecting broad-based adoption across mid-size warehousing. Whether that pattern is because automation genuinely only pays off at that scale, or simply because large operators with the site availability and balance sheet to build purpose-built facilities move first and publicity follows their scale, isn't something this research can answer. None of these Australian projects approach the scale routinely quoted for the world's largest fulfilment operators, either — see why Amazon's robot numbers don't translate into a benchmark for a mid-size Australian distribution centre.

This is a useful reference point for a business weighing its own ASRS investment case against what's already proven out publicly here, and for understanding goods-to-person and ASRS system choices as they've actually been deployed in Australia, not just described in vendor literature.

Keeping this list current

This is a list of projects that dates. New Australian automated distribution centre announcements happen regularly, and a project reported as under construction can open later, or not at all — Auburn itself slipped a year past its original announced timeline. Treat the facts above as accurate as at the date this page was last checked, and expect it to be reviewed and updated as new, verifiable Australian projects are publicly reported.

Common questions

What's the largest Australian automated distribution centre publicly reported so far?

Woolworths' Auburn Automated Customer Fulfilment Centre, a 22,000 square metre facility that opened in May 2025 as part of an A$780 million investment across its automated and semi-automated Sydney distribution centres, per Woolworths Group's own media release and independent trade reporting.

Which Australian retailers are using automated distribution?

Woolworths (its own Auburn facility) and Coles (partnering separately with Witron and with Ocado) are the two large grocery retailers with publicly reported automated distribution centre projects found in this research. Parts distributors WesTrac and Hallite have also installed Dematic AutoStore systems.

Is warehouse automation widespread in Australia yet?

Based on what's been publicly reported, adoption is currently concentrated in a small number of very large operators rather than broad-based across Australian warehousing generally. No independent market-adoption survey specific to Australia was found in this research.

How reliable are the operational figures for these projects?

It varies by source. Woolworths' Auburn figures come from the company's own media release, corroborated by independent trade press. The WesTrac and Hallite figures are the vendor Dematic's own case-study claims, and no independent audit of those specific numbers was found in this research.

Read next

• goods-to-person fulfilment
• when ASRS investment pays off
• automation projects that went wrong
• Amazon's disclosed robot numbers
• clad-rack warehouse
• floor flatness for automated warehouses