Automation flexes its muscles

While eCommerce was already booming prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, experts credit the virus with accelerating the shift to online shopping by approximately five years. As a result, thousands of brick-and-mortar stores across the world are shutting their doors, prompting retailers to identify new ways to deliver on customer demands. 

As more consumers opt for the convenience—and safety—of online shopping, many retailers are now leveraging their store infrastructure to process eCommerce orders. Transforming brick-and-mortar locations into micro-fulfillment hubs enables retailers to reduce delivery times and costs while also improving the customer experience. With worker health and safety still a concern and social distancing a must, retailers are turning to automation to increase fulfillment speed and capacity while limiting human interaction.

Robotics suppliers are searching for more cost effective and quick to implement ways to achieve micro-fulfillment.

Tompkins Robotics president Mike Futch says: “Most micro-fulfillment solutions are based on traditional ASRS technologies. These automated systems provide dense storage and use robots and shuttles to pull and put away containers of goods. ASRS solutions enable retailers to increase speed, capacity and productivity while removing most of the labour from the sales floor, thus improving the customer experience for in-store shoppers.”

Tompkins Robotics has developed an alternative approach. 

Mike continues: “While they boast many benefits, standard ASRS solutions also come with their share of challenges. In addition to requiring more space than other automated systems, ASRS solutions can take up to over a year to deploy and cost upwards of $5 million. Due to their size and layout restrictions, many traditional ASRS solutions are only suited for standalone micro-fulfillment centres (MFCs) or dark stores and cannot be easily implemented into retail space or store backrooms.”

Solutions that use AMRs are an alternative for retailers looking to quickly implement a cost-effective solution with limited space. Based on its t-Sort technology, Tompkins Robotics has developed a micro-fulfillment solution that can be used in a store backroom and also integrate with ASRS solutions to optimise operations at standalone MFCs, dark stores or other high-volume facilities.

The solution enhances e-commerce order processing by allowing batch picks of hundreds of orders by department or aisle. It facilitates inbound sortation of mixed containers to individual aisle segments for faster, more efficient shelf stocking and sorts outbound parcels by route, courier or local delivery unit. The solution also utilises Tompkins Robotics’ t-Rail system to provide overhead transportation of goods to and from the sales floor, minimising floor congestion and human interaction.

Mike says: “Tompkins Robotics’ system can be deployed in as little as one week and requires approximately one tenth of the cost and space of other leading solutions. The modular and portable design enables retailers to add elements in minutes and relocate the solution in as little as two days to accommodate peak seasons and demand changes.”

UK 3PL Wincanton, on the other hand, sees pop-up fulfilment centres as a solution for the short-term, with a move towards large dark stores the ultimate solution, particularly in urban areas with large volumes of deliveries. Wincanton has expanded into this space recently by partnering with Waitrose.com to open a fulfilment centre in West London to serve its online consumers. This is a major shift for both businesses, with Waitrose reacting to clear trends in the market and Wincanton using its expertise and experience in eCommerce to provide a solution that suits changing consumer behaviour; in the process becoming the first UK 3PL to run such an operation.

Wincanton MD of grocery and consumer James Hurrell says: “This is an exciting vision into the future of UK grocery logistics. Large facilities designed to increase efficiency and improve experience are a logical step for grocers that have been using methods such as in-store picking to fulfil online orders alongside traditional activity.”

The 3PL is also using its W2 Labs programme to develop innovative warehouse automation tech that often approaches problems in radical ways. One example is SqUID technology from start-up BionicHIVE, shortlisted in the ‘Dark Store’ category for 2021’s W2 Labs programme. Th tech will be trialled and refined within Wincanton’s UK-wide operation. 

What makes it stand out is that the AMRs move like carts around the warehouse carrying loads, but can also climb racks to place and remove boxes.

BionicHIVE’s Ilan Reingold said: “BionicHIVE enables seamless and affordable adoption of warehouse automation, without requiring any changes to existing warehouse infrastructure. Our robotic fleet operates in any warehouse, on any rack and shelf, handling any box, and is flexible to handle any item.”

The firm sees an opportunity in Wincanton’s scheme to scale up once the solution is proven.

Peaky blinders

Peak events are becoming more extreme and increasingly frequent. Now, with the high street paralysed by Covid restrictions, consumers are turning to the Internet in even greater numbers that look set to be sustained far beyond the usual Black Friday and Christmas period.

Invar is an integrator supplying Hikrabot AMRs to the UK market. 

Invar Integration MD Craig Whitehouse has some advice for coping with unpredictable peaks.

“If businesses wish to compete efficiently across multiple peaks throughout the year, then a new way of thinking is required, along with clever use of intelligent automation,” he explains.

There are many unknowns for retailers to consider. Will the high street bounce back strongly after Covid? Could more people work from home and favour click n’ collect? Will product profiles change, SKUs proliferate, or may consumer buying behaviour change radically?

Craig continues: “With such uncertainty, flexibility will be imperative. Omni-channel businesses will need to create fulfilment processes that are agile, efficient and resilient, while taking advantage of the higher performance that the latest advanced automated systems can offer.”

SMEs, in particular, have an opportunity to steal a march on larger retail organisations that may have committed to less than flexible, fixed automated systems, Invar argues. By adopting intelligent software and advanced mobile robot technology, SMEs can leverage the flexibility, speed and performance of goods-to-person automation as a low-CapEx project. Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) offer flexibility and scalability in traditional labour-intensive tasks such as order picking and put-away. AMR systems combined with pick-to-light technology can boost order picking performance from under 100 units per hour using traditional methods, to up to 600 picks per hour.

Pay as you go

Style intelligence regularly surveys automated warehouse suppliers and in a recent survey - AGV & AMR Robotics 2020 - noted an increase in clients interested in opex, pay as you go style models. Previously the market had been heavily orientated towards capex models.

Vecna Robotics contributed to the research saying ‘Initially it was all capex and they said we have much lower cost of capital than you so it is going to make sense to buy everything… but then post-covid we have seen a real shift to capital preservation and more people are coming back to Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS)’.

However, despite the interest, the paper goes on to highlight a number of obstacles to implementation, such as customers lacking anything to compare a potential solution with and the need for the supplier to closely monitor the customer’s operations.

Robot supplier Balyo says ‘we charge per load. This is a combination of lifts, distance driven, etc. For RaaS we need to install our fleet manager in the cloud’.

The survey suggests leasing options may be more mature and ready to go, which perhaps places robotic suppliers with links to forklift companies [a sector with long experience in equipment leasing] in the driving seat.

With the pandemic looking likely to linger for most of 2021, it will continue to impact the world of fulfillment. Watch this space to see how deep these changes go, and keep track of the turns they will ultimately take, as we continue to explore this issue closely.