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While fixed systems such as conveyor belts and sortation machines have long been the industry standard due to their efficiency, they lack adaptability. They are also costly to modify, and often require significant downtime to accommodate changes in product lines, volumes or processes. Now, businesses face a critical choice: stick with traditional fixed warehouse automation systems, or embrace flexible solutions like autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), which have the agility and scalability needed to thrive in a constantly changing market.
The Case for Flexible Automation
The argument for flexible automation is easy to grasp. Unlike fixed automation, flexible automation empowers warehouses and distribution centers to adapt as demands change. This reduces costs and allows businesses to scale efficiently for peak periods (which are becoming more frequent), all while fostering long-term resilience and competitiveness. “You can build a platform that is flexible so that, no matter what happens, when management calls and says we’re going to run a sale, or we’re going to scale back, you don’t feel whipsawed,” says Mike Johnson, president and chief operating officer of Locus Robotics. “That’s the flexibility right there; the ability to move.”
“When we get customers in the door, we’ve got a three-to-five-year contract, typically, and nobody wants to bolt much down,” says Matthew Dippold, director of digital acceleration at DHL Supply Chain, which deploys persons-to-goods automation systems in multiple facilities. “With peak scenarios, we’re able to scale more robots into the system to deal with the demands that are coming as holiday season ramps up,” Dippold continues. “You couldn’t do that with a fixed system. Maybe you could ramp up the speed of the system, but that’s all you could do.”
First-Time Automation: A Strategic Approach
When a warehouse or DC is embarking on a project to introduce flexible automation, it’s extremely important to strategically identify first of all where you want to see improvements — for example, increasing through-flow of orders, or dealing with spikes in demand during peaks. “Our teams — sales, engineering and optimization and customer success teams — get involved very strategically and collaboratively,” explains Neil Bentley, senior director of product management at Locus Robotics. “Together, we set clear goals. To do that, the company has to know their baseline metrics. It used to be, you’d go to a site, and they were just guessing! It’s super important for leaders to understand exactly where they’re at. We love leveraging data. When you know your baseline, we have very rich data and analytics and can show cycle times and so much more.”
Another metric that needs to be clear from the get-go is ROI. That will help determine where the AMRs go, at least initially. That’s part of having a strategic vision from the beginning of the process. “We want to start in a good place where the bots just naturally provide value. Then we need to know, how do you anticipate this scaling, and what comes next — a pick tower, perhaps?” Bentley says.
Johnson says another key to success is to ensure that all stakeholders are engaged, especially the operations team on the site. “They’re huge stakeholders. If they buy in to the automation, whatever automation, then you get alignment and they’re incentivized to make it work,” says Johnson.
Then there’s the tactical side. “You don’t have to start small,” says Johnson. “We’ve had many companies where they’ve lit up a one-million-square-feet building.” But you can start small, Johnson says, with, say, a 50,000 square-foot warehouse and 20 AMRs, then expand to a full building and many more robots. The system is designed to be almost endlessly expandable, according to needs. That’s the whole point.
Adapting to Volume, Product, and Channel Shifts
There’s no longer a single, relatively predictable peak season for shipping. A surge in orders can come because it’s Mother’s Day, or because a celebrity sported a designer bag at the Oscars, or any number of the inscrutable things that go on with influencers on social media.
“We're constantly being told we're in a whole new world, especially in terms of retail, but what, specifically, does that mean inside the warehouse?” muses Johnson. “If you’re suddenly selling 30,000 pieces of an item in a day, you can move all that over to a fast-pick station.” Instead of one place where picking is being conducted by one bot at a time, you can use 20 robots at a time to pick that item and get it out of the door, in what Johnson refers to as Fast Pick. “They surround this thing and pick it like crazy,” he says.
DHL Supply Chain’s Dippold particularly appreciates this feature. “It’s where I can get an order through the system faster by disconnecting it from other orders that might be slower,” he says. “Now, we can focus on speed-to-market and serving the customer, gaining natural increases in efficiencies because of the logic and the ability to choose the pick path.” These abilities, Dippold says, have allowed DHL to better and more quickly adjust to the changing demands from their customers. “That has helped us to adapt, and to be more agile in our response to those fluctuations.”
The flexibility works well to serve the growth in omnichannel fulfillment, where orders can vary enormously in scale. “With the new automation solutions, you can do omnichannel effectively,” says Johnson. “We have a lot of retailers that truly do it all within one building — e-commerce, wholesale, everything. They can do a bunch of different things in the same building, with the same inventory.”
Enhancing Existing Investments with Pick Towers
Pick towers can be part of an initial automation project or can come in as second step in the automation journey, Johnson says. That includes either automating existing pick towers or building automation-native ones. The advantages are that you can increase throughput with the same physical footprint.
Bentley cites a recent installation for a major retailer who wanted to design greenfield sites to make the most of flexible automation opportunities. The company designed pick towers where bots can pick and pass orders between different tower levels. “They have the flexibility to pack on multiple levels. They really thought about how to optimize the whole experience,” says Bentley.
Existing pick towers are good candidates for automation, although there can be challenges with training staff and also with space — aisle widths less than four feet tend to be a barrier to automation, Johnson says.
The Future of Warehouse Automation
As warehouse automation takes hold, so too will the adoption of flexible automation, even for tasks that seem to necessitate fixed infrastructure. DHL, for example, has tended to favor fixed automation when products are especially large or heavy — for example automotive parts, or parts for HVAC systems. But they’ve recently started seeing the benefits of mobile carts that are designed to handle big, heavy, bulky items. DHL’s Dippold says the secret sauce is the execution software that orchestrates the machines.
Johnson says the innovations getting the most attention at present are those that can increase density and throughput volume to make the most of facility space, as well as deploying artificial intelligence. But the bigger picture is simply that automation as a whole is taking hold, and the benefits of flexible automation, including autonomous robots, are becoming more apparent.
“There’s a step change,” Johnson says. “We’re really getting towards an automated warehouse, and real levels of autonomy. It’s hard work, but we’re getting there.” Johnson sees opportunities to deploy AMRs in tasks where there’s traditionally been zero automation, such as loading and unloading trucks at warehouse docks. “It's not just about the robots,” says Bentley. “It's a holistic solution that leads to scalability — the ability to go from 50,000 units a day to 150,000. The thing we like to see is a company that can go 3X or 5X or more within the same building, with the same solution.”
AI will continue to play an important role, Johnson adds. “We see a bunch of initiatives, and it is moving the needle, no question,” he says. “The systems can be highly adaptive. They can take a huge dataset and digest it, help make decisions. I think that will continue.”
Johnson says the warehouse management technology sector for a while was focused on software, and over the past 10 years, has come a long way in terms of wrangling some order into inventory and order management processes, for example. “The software is there. There’s some control over inbound processes and now they can tackle having people get stuff out,” Johnson says. “But it’s still very manual, and people are doing the hard work to find the inventory and get it out.”
Bentley points out that the game-changer with the AMR system is how easy it is to use. “The breakthrough for us was that we decided to make this super simple. If you’ve been on an iPad, you go up to the bot and you’re off and running. There’s zero time to learn. You can use it immediately.”
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