Can robots help with Peak?

This year may prove to be the tipping point for warehouse robotics that compensate for the shrinking labour pool by enabling the transition from time-intensive person-to-goods picking to productivity-enhancing goods-to-person picking.

The philosophy is simple. Instead of having pickers travel up and down aisles pulling products, store the products in a way that allows them to be presented to stationary pickers who focus exclusively on assembling orders. 

This approach, which has gained significant momentum in the last three years, is enabled by compact, modular robot-based systems, such as AutoStore and CarryPick. They are said to make better use of human resources, allowing more orders to be pulled with fewer people, and dramatically reduce picking times to help meet customer demands for faster delivery.

Unlike traditional “bolted-down” automation systems, these modular systems provide the flexibility to scale to meet higher throughput resulting from sustained growth or peak demand. With either system mentioned above, robots can be added on-the-fly to support peak demand. Some warehouse operators keep a reserve of robots idle for most of the year and then deploy them during the holiday season when throughputs hit their peak. They can also be moved to a new warehouse if the business outgrows the facility where they were initially deployed. 

It’s become clear that fulfillment centres must reduce their dependence on human labour to continue to grow and meet changing customer expectations. Robotic goods-to-person automation systems provide a viable solution to do exactly that. The technology is mature, scalable and cost effective.

See the white paper, Using Automation to Manage Growth in E-commerce Fulfillment, among other here.