Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Retail Technologies, 2024
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Active Ants was founded in 2010 with the goal of making e-fulfillment more accurate and efficient through innovation, automation and working together with robots. The European 3PL uses robotic automation to uphold SLAs for a variety of customers.
To aid its picking operations, Active Ants deployed GreyOrange’s Ranger Move Smart (RMS) robots along with the GreyMatter WES. We asked two of their senior members — Bram Blondé, CEO, and Perry de Ronde, Site Manager — to talk to us about the impacts of the solution and the drivers that led to choosing it.
Bram Blondé, CEO
Active Ants started during the period when e-commerce started. It was a big change in the logistical industry because, in the past, logistics companies had to pick and pack for retail shops. So they went with pallets and rollcages — they were looking for a lot of goods that they had to combine together.
With e-commerce, suddenly every individual order was just one piece or two pieces. And the traditional way of working, running around in a warehouse, was not realistic anymore.
Perry de Ronde, Site Manager
What we were looking for is: how we can organize things on a small footprint? And how can we keep things scalable? The RMS system is indeed exactly doing that. Traditionally, if you want to build a warehouse, you have to define where the conveyor lines go and you have to define where all the stations have to go because once you have built it, you can never change it again.
Bram Blondé
At Active Ants, we thought: how can we change this? How can we do it differently? And we looked at two key components.
The first component was: how can we bring the goods towards the people — towards our people that are picking and packing? That was a big change, and that’s the solution. We looked at the Autostore solution. That was number one. And the second part was, “How can we package those goods more efficiently?” And that’s when we also looked at the GreyOrange Solution, which was part of that second journey.
Perry de Ronde
One benefit that we have seen is that the picking accuracy has increased.
That is the real big thing for our customers and our customer satisfaction. The other thing, which is very good for the operations in a sense, is that before we had to work with picking waves, creating batches of orders, and then doing all this work. Now we are working with this new system where every order is its own thing.
Before, we had pick waves that took, let’s say 2 to 3 hours before they were all processed. Today, we get orders in from our customers, they are processed within one minute into our servers, and, in a matter of like 10 minutes, they come down the closing line to be closed and sorted to the carrier. So, the lead time from the initial intake of the order to the output of the parcel is a matter of 10 or 15 minutes, whereas before this was taking two, three or sometimes four hours. In respect to efficiency, to taking the whole flow into consideration: while we have seen that in the past, when we were doing things in a different way than today, of course, is that the total efficiency that we have now is about 60% on the overall process.
We had a lot of people running around, going for orders, picking, and packing parcels. Today, we have the RMS system. We have the robots. They run around for us, and our people are stationary at the workstation. The picker will put the item inside the box, which is on top of the RMS robot. The RMS will come from the pick station and will go to the closing line. From the closing line, it will then go to the chutes so that we can sort by carrier. That’s a whole different way of working altogether.
Bram Blondé
Another key element for us as a company is continuous improvement.
With the artificial intelligence software getting better, we can also get better and faster solutions. To give an example, during peak last year, we had a lot of volume, and one of our packaging machines broke down. And then we had all these GreyOrange robots creating a traffic jam and getting in each other’s way.
We had some brainstorming sessions that afternoon with GreyOrange asking, “How can we solve this?” And they found the solution – software. Instead of creating a big traffic jam, after every four robots, they created some space so that all the robots could pass through. With that solution, we didn’t only solve one problem; that solution is used today to have a better crossing of robots, meaning a more efficient solution in general with the robots that we currently have.
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Bram Blondé
We are growing very fast. Last year, we grew more than 25%, and our solution attracts customers. When customers arrive over here, they immediately see the solution. They see the possibilities, and they see a solution that they can’t develop themselves. Because our type of customers are medium to small customers, e-commerce web shops, they don’t have the money to invest in a technical solution like we have.
When they come to us, they see the possibilities and they are happy afterward with the service because our solution is very qualitative. During peaks, we can easily scale up and provide a variety of services. The most important period for our customers is peak.
And another element is the growth of our customers. Our customers are growing with GreyOrange and adding robots. We can support that growth not only here in our sites but also internationally, serving them the same solution again in different countries.
Bram Blondé
There are three key elements. First of all, with the GryeOrange solution, we have less transportation in the warehouse. Less transportation movement means less unuseful people movement and lower cost.
Second, we are in a 20,000 square meter warehouse. We want to grow towards 10 million e-commerce orders a year, but we are not there from the start. With GreyOrange, we were able to scale our investment gradually. We started with only a couple of robots. When we grow, the number of robots grows together with us. And third topic is fixed costs compared to variable costs; it’s software.
The fixed costs are very low, which is adding more robots. It’s variable cost and that is an important one in e-commerce, where you grow.
Perry de Ronde
The big change for us is that, in the past, people were running around. Now, the RMS is running for us. And this is exactly the reason why we have selected this solution.
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