Data makes the difference

FOR BOTS And Us it is all about gathering data and extracting insights to improve warehouse operations. Mim, the distinctive-looking robot that is gliding around a growing number of UK warehouses, is simply the most elegant way to gather data in the setting. The Mim is bristling with sensors, and is able to quickly build up an accurate grasp of what’s on pallets and shelves.

Look under the hood, however, and Bots And Us is primarily a software company, as becomes apparent when you look at the stages of work the company seeks to carry out with its customers.

The first stage is the automation of a process, for example carrying out cycle counts in a warehouse. The robot is able to free up a team of people from dull and monotonous tasks such as this, and carry out the work in a faster and more thorough way.

Bots And Us co-founder Oana Jinga explains: “A retail customer had a team of four doing cycle counts non-stop, and it took them six weeks to complete a full warehouse, whereas the Mim bots can do it in 4 hours. The team’s work is now much less boring, they can focus on exceptions and not simple counts.”

Another quick benefit can be compliance, checking if consignments received are as promised, with evidence quickly available to challenge non-compliance.

From here on in, the benefits are much more about data and insights. The next stage is to use the data gathered by Mim to produce a close to real time map of the warehouse that accurately reflects where stock is, where free space is, and over time, how fast stock is moving etc.

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This kind of insight allows customers to accurately calculate cube utilisation in a warehouse, and consolidate SKUs, to free up pallet spaces. This can be particularly valuable for a 3PL. After all, freeing up sufficient space may make the difference between being able to serve a new customer from a facility and not.

Oana continues: “The second step is, once you have all of this data, what else can you do with it? You can be more efficient, for example, spotting where there is space and turning that into a revenue stream.”

The next stage is to provide deeper analysis of the warehouse for customers. This is effectively the use of data from Mim, and other sources, to create a digital twin of the warehouse, which the Bots And Us platform (which is still in development) will mine for insights that can make a difference to those operations.

Oana explains: “The data the bots gather can create quick insights, which can be fed into the customer’s WMS to action process improvements.

“The next level will be to work out how to use the platform to make further improvements, and help strategically plan operations. The challenge is to be able to capture enough data to build a model and know that if you change some inputs how this will impact other parts of the operation.”

To assist its quest for a full picture of the warehouse, Bots And Us are looking at many other data sources to complement that collected by Mims, such as data from wearables, forklift-based sensors, scales, temperature sensors and much else.

The company is also exploring partnerships with system integrators and consultancies to help customers convert data-driven insights into actionable plans, although it also aims to use AI tools to generate as much insight automatically as possible. 

Hardware

While data and insights are where the real action is, the Mim is an impressive bot. It looks a little like a picking bot, but is used for data gathering only. Indeed, Mims have been deployed alongside Locus picking robots, helping to boost their productivity. 

“One of our customers is using Locus robots to do picking,” says Oana. “We can analyse quantities in every SKU to support the efficiency of the Locus robots, because if there is not enough of an item at the SKU the Locus robot will still finalise its mission, and you will only see the nil picks when it finishes its run. By knowing where the stock is in real time, you can reduce the number of nil picks by about 60% a day.”

Technically, the Mim is an impressive piece of kit, it can scan racks up to 8-10 metres. While LIDAR operates over long range, taking pictures and reading small barcodes in poor light can be more challenging. If a customer wants 100% coverage, Bots And Us can add cameras and sensors to flesh out the picture drawn by the Mims.

Fellow co-founder Andrei Danescu adds that a big advantage of the robots is that the data is processed directly on the device, so you don’t have to push enormous quantities of data to the cloud and wait for results. 

The firm’s pricing model is on a Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model, with a fee per bot per month, so no big capital investment. Implementations can be scaled up and down quickly and a rule of thumb suggests one or two robots needed for a small warehouse and 5-10 for a big one. This pricing model is likely to evolve a SaaS flavour, as different layers of insights are unlocked with more data analysed over time.

Manual warehouses

In June, Bots And Us secured $13 million in seed financing to develop this warehouse data intelligence platform. Against a background of rising interest rates, investors are now extremely choosy about investment vehicles, and increasingly focused on profit above all else, so it is a good sign that Bots And Us has secured this funding.

The investment was led by Lakestar. Its partner Christoph Schuh says: “More than 80% of warehouses have no automation at all. Logistics is an industry that always faced margin pressures and little means to invest into a digital infrastructure. BotsAndUs real-time data capture abilities create this infrastructure and the basis for long term automation of warehousing operations.”

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As Christoph says, the main opportunity for Bots And Us is in the manual warehouse. After all, automated warehouses tend towards good visibility and sophisticated control anyway.

Andrei Danescu explains further: “The ambition is to become the intelligence layer you can drop into any warehouse, that immediately starts telling you how you can run operations more efficiently, that’s the end game for us.”

At the time of our interview in April, Bots And Us had only been active in the logistics market for around a year. They have made remarkable progress, gaining a number of large customers very quickly. You wouldn’t bet against them building on this.

Oana concludes: “We are not looking outside logistics, we see a huge opportunity and want to be a key player for data in logistics.”

For more information, visit botsandus.com