Rocketing robotic growth for HAI

THIS Q&A introduces the innovative HAI Robotics, which has made significant inroads to the UK market, and marked its success at the recent IMHX show.

Who are HAI Robotics, and who is the local team?

HAI Robotics was established in 2016 in Shenzhen, China, where it independently developed its HAIPICK solution; the world's first Autonomous Case-handling Robot (ACR) system for goods-to-person order picking. It differs from other existing Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) solutions by utilising the height available and intelligently identifying desired totes and cartons of varying sizes and bringing them to a workstation autonomously, instead of bringing the entire rack. The HAIPICK ACR solution has been implemented in over 500 projects globally, including multiple sites in the UK.

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Country manager Damien Skinner and solution manager Nikil Bharakhada

HAI Robotics established its European headquarters at the end of 2021, shortly after establishing its UK subsidiary early 2022. The company is now focused on building up an experienced local team to develop and implement its solutions in Europe. In the UK and Ireland, the company's efforts are headed by country manager Damien Skinner and solution manager Nikil Bharakhada.

What challenges do HAI solutions tackle?

We have seen that logistics service providers are struggling to keep up with ever-growing demand. This makes sense when you look at, for example, the growth of the eComm market in the UK. This business grew from £42.6 billion in 2015 to £129 billion in 2021 (Statista, 2022). This tremendous growth is only expected to quicken in the years to come. If we more specifically look at retail eComm sales as part of the overall retail trade, we see that online sales in 2021 occupied roughly 29% of all retail sales. By comparison, this was only 13.5% in 2014 (Statista, 2022). This development is in line with the growth of eComm on the European mainland as well. The growth of the eComm market has in turn led to this industry occupying roughly 27.5% of all available warehouses in the UK, with his number expected to grow around 8.44% in the next three years (LogisticsIQ, 2022).

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The eComm business is therefore booming and shows no signs of slowing down, which puts a strain on warehouses to keep up, not in the least because it has become increasingly harder to find skilled workers fit to do this job. This is where opting for the HAIPICK solution can tremendously help warehouses. For example, one of the most influential designer brand fashion houses in China opted for our HAIPICK solution to automate their goods return process. Their original manual process required a workforce of 76 workers, handling 30 000 items per day. After implementing HAIPICK, the same efficiency was reached with a workforce of just 16 workers, greatly reducing staffing and operational costs. This solution is especially interesting for the UK clothing and footwear industry, where the value of returned goods is expected to reach roughly £4.4 billion in 2026 (Drapers, 2022). 

What is your approach to UK clients?

HAI Robotics is committed to servicing all its clients in the UK and Ireland with a local approach. This is exactly the reason why we established an official UK branch shortly after establishing our European HQ in the Netherlands. We are building up a team that can guide clients in their automation process, from guiding them to an automation solution that fits their specific situation and requirements, to designing and implementing that solution. This also includes the integration of any on-site WMS, or delivering a system that is running on HAIQ, HAI Robotics self-developed software. Finally, we have a core implementation crew that is based in the UK that are on standby to guide the implementation process. HAI Robotics is also actively working on securing UKCA marking for when this standard is officially implemented on January 1, 2023.

The UK and Ireland are big markets, which is why we are also building up a local partner network to ensure that clients not only receive comprehensive support from HAI Robotics in their automation process. By teaming up with local partners, who are experienced and who know the local market, we are able to guarantee a smooth implementation process with accompanying after-sales and maintenance support.

What kind of projects have you delivered?

One of the projects we have implemented in the UK was for cross-border warehouse operation WINIT, which is a provider of overall solutions for cross-border eComm. They operate overseas warehousing and distribution services in the UK, Europe, the U.S. And Australia. The WINIT site in Tamworth, Staffordshire is 10,000 sq m, has the capacity to handle 50,000 items per day and has 120,000 storage locations. Here, WINIT was faced with three major challenges, namely staffing shortages and rising labour costs, lacking storage density and order picking efficiency, and finally the need for an automation solution that could be rapidly implemented.

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In order to meet these challenges, we provided WINIT with a solution consisting of 100 HAIPICK A42 robots and 16 on-conveyor picking workstations. The HAIPICK A42 allows picking and sorting with eight payloads in one movement, which enables a single worker to handle roughly 450 items per hour. This is three to four times faster than a fully manual operation. Finally, the HAIPICK robots are only roughly one metre in width and can pick up to 5.2m high. This means storage density is significantly improved because of higher racks that are more closely placed together, again compared to a non-automated operation.

In short, our HAIPICK goods-to-person order picking solution was able to increase worker efficiency exponentially, increase storage density significantly and was deployed within 3 months, meaning WINIT was able to quickly start using their automation solution and start fulfilling their customers' needs.

What vertical markets are showing most interest in ACRs?

One of the major benefits about the HAIPICK ACR solution is that its suited for a large variety of differently sized items. We mentioned this before with eComm companies, where you often see a large variety in their product mix and therefore in the sizes of their items. HAIPICK automatically detects the size of a carton or tote in a rack and is able to process it. We can even divide totes into multiple compartments to create multi-SKU totes for the smallest of items.

Additionally, we see that most eComm companies grow rapidly over time, which we see reflected in the growth numbers of this industry in the UK mentioned earlier. Normally, this would make it challenging to design an automation solution that fits this company both now, as well as 5 years later. The flexibility of HAIPICK again meets this challenge effortlessly. We design solutions that can easily grow together in size with a business, as their business requirements expand. 

The fashion and apparel industry is another example mentioned in this article. Our HAIPICK solution is the only automation solution that combines the flexibility of handling cartons with the advantages of storage density. Thanks to the high flexibility of our robot's algorithms, it is perfectly capable of handling the widest diversity of operational scenarios, including standard inbound, outbound, retail buffer storage, returns and sales peaks.

For more information, visit www.hairobotics.com