Mobile Robots Feed Warehouse Demand For Adaptability

From FreightWaves
By Linda Baker

“The ability to flex up and flex down depending on what is happening in the real world is going to be the wave of the future”

The pandemic and seemingly unstoppable e-commerce surge is accelerating robotic takeover of the warehouse space, as brands seize on flexible automated solutions to address a variety of marketplace challenges.

“You can’t meet the demands of modern commerce with systems that were built for a previous era,” said Terrie O’Hanlon, chief marketing officer for  GreyOrange, a software and mobile robotics company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to make warehouse operations more efficient.

Adaptability in particular has become an essential tool as operators must respond quickly to customer demand that is at once surging and fluctuating wildly, O’Hanlon said.

GreyOrange provides fleets of autonomous modular sorting robots (available in six “form factors”) that move parcels from receiving through dispatch. The company’s key differentiator, according to O’Hanlon, is an AI-driven fulfillment operating system that allows the devices to communicate with one another and adapt to changes in real time, as order patterns and fulfillment expectations change.

The COVID-19 factor

Warehouse robotics investment surged 57% in 2020, according to a recent Pitchbook report, as brands jump on solutions designed to reduce labor costs and improve e-commerce delivery times.

The pandemic is only accelerating development of new robotics technologies, with maintenance and cleaning emerging as a prime target area for mobile automation.

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Nimble operations 

From a logistics perspective, the pandemic and macroeconomic climate are accelerating interest in flexible warehouse assets, said Karl Siebrecht, CEO of aptly named Flexe, a Seattle-based on-demand warehousing company. “What we’re seeing is a two-front war that retailers are trying to keep up with,” he explained. E-commerce is surging, so retailers worry they don’t have enough warehouses. But if they have brick-and-mortar operations, total business may be down.

“In a recession, the last thing you may want to do is make capital investments,” Siebrecht said. Flexe’s business model and value proposition is about winning the two-front war: adding new warehouse locations and capacity very quickly with no fixed costs.

That framework informs the GreyOrange business model. Companies today are putting smaller amounts of inventory in smaller warehouses closer to consumers, O’Hanlon noted, while also looking to make all inventory, e-commerce and brick and mortar, visible and accessible to the system. As these micro-fulfillment and omnichannel practices reshape e-commerce, expensive, fixed automation investments become less attractive.

Instead, scalable mobile robots can help companies adapt to changing fulfillment dynamics without breaking the bank.

“With COVID, everything changed overnight,” O’Hanlon said. “The ability to flex up and flex down depending on what is really happening in the real world is going to be the wave of the future.”

Mobile robotic solutions come with other advantages —  namely, they help smaller e-commerce operators compete with the Amazon juggernaut, O’Hanlon observed. “People want to do business with local providers if they can get the same level of convenience and service,” she said.

Read the full article at FreightWaves.