Goods-to-Person fulfillment is evolving
With continued pressure on the fulfillment industry from unabated eCommerce growth, warehouse managers struggle to contain costs while handling an ever-increasing workload, says Invia Robotics.
They are pressured to process more SKUs on tighter deadlines. With record low unemployment and increasing wages, more online vendors and third-party logistics firms are embracing warehouse automation as the only viable way forward.
Because labour accounts for 50% or more of the total cost of fulfilling an order, automating the least efficient aspect of labor activity—item picking—yields the greatest increases in efficiency and ROI.
“Goods-to-person” systems with software tells pickers which items to choose, and these systems can substantially increase the productivity of workers while reducing picking errors. Traditional GTP systems, known as automatic storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), are usually large vertical carousels. These systems are efficient, but they cost millions of dollars and require re-engineering the entire warehouse.
The next evolution of goods-to-person is replacing fixed AS/RS infrastructure with autonomous mobile robots. Robotics vendors began using technologies like LIDAR, advanced sensors, and machine learning software to deploy robots which can move about a warehouse, avoid obstacles, deliver to a picking station, and even go to a recharging station to recharge themselves when their batteries run down.
Early AMRs moved shelves to the picking station.
The first iteration of AMRs, typically required replacing fixed shelving with four-sided “towers.” The brick-shaped robots go under, lift up and move these towers around the warehouse. The robots literally take the shelves to the person rather than the person going to the shelves. Despite its ingenuity, this still requires a complete reconfiguration of the warehouse – a major investment.
A new generation of AMRs followed that works within existing warehouse environments, large and small. The advantages of these robots are: low up-front costs, quick deployment, and flexible capacity. Warehouses can increase the number of robots during peak shopping seasons and reduce the number as demand drops.
A problem still remained to be solved, though. Most of these mobile, cheaper robots do not deliver the increased productivity of a goods-to-person solution. They are, rather, a person-to-goods solution that still requires people walking the warehouse aisles. The robots merely help them pick the right order and transport it back to the picking station.
New generation
There is now a mobile, economic robotics system that represents a true goods-to-person solution that can be deployed in any warehouse with any configuration – quickly. The inVia Robotics solution includes robots equipped with an extensible platform and an arm with suction cups that can actually locate a specific bin or tote on a shelf, remove the tote, and carry it back to a stationary picker. The resulting increase in worker productivity can be as much as 500%.
