Robotics lifts warehouse efficiency to new levels

What impact has the coronavirus pandemic had on ecommerce retailers and their fulfilment operations?

COVID-19 and stay-at-home direc­tives have sig­nif­i­cant­ly accel­er­at­ed the move to ecom­merce. I would say, pre­vi­ous­ly, the ratio was still around 80–20 in favour of bricks and mor­tar. Since the start of the pan­dem­ic, it has flipped the oth­er way in favour of ecom­merce. This move is unlike­ly to be reversed and it has opened up a whole new range of sup­ply chain chal­lenges. In a world of instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and Ama­zon-scale ful­fil­ment, con­sumers expect near-imme­di­ate deliv­ery when pur­chas­ing items online.

How has the use of robotics technology in warehouse environments evolved in recent years?

Automa­tion has been avail­able for many years, but it has been rel­a­tive­ly expen­sive and time con­sum­ing to imple­ment. The tech­nol­o­gy has improved and robot­ics is now mov­ing from an ear­ly-adopter phase into the main­stream Mean­while, oth­er dri­vers, like the shift to ecom­merce and labour short­ages, are forc­ing ware­house oper­a­tors to look to alter­na­tives to improve pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. The volatil­i­ty of the ecom­merce mar­ket­place makes plan­ning very dif­fi­cult. Vol­umes can grow expo­nen­tial­ly and new oppor­tu­ni­ties can present them­selves almost overnight. The sit­u­a­tion requires a far more agile solu­tion so the tech­nol­o­gy can be quick­ly repur­posed if the sit­u­a­tion requires.

Where does Synergy come into this and how have you been supporting organisations by optimising their warehouse environments?

Syn­er­gy realised robot­ics is essen­tial in the ware­house of the future. We exam­ined the robot­ics mar­ket and con­clud­ed we could cre­ate our own robot­ic solu­tion that exact­ly met the oper­a­tional require­ments of the future. Many of the exist­ing ven­dors came from a robot­ics engi­neer­ing back­ground and had scant knowl­edge of how a ware­house actu­al­ly works. Put sim­ply, we knew the prob­lem and designed the solu­tion, in con­trast to oth­er ven­dors which had a solu­tion and were look­ing for the prob­lem.

Synergy is launching a new autonomous mobile robot in the third quarter of 2021. How are you looking to disrupt the market with this robot?

Synergy’s robot, Snap­Cart, is an inte­gral part of our cloud-based ware­house man­age­ment sys­tem, Snap­Ful­fil, which con­trols in real time all resources with­in the ware­house. It works with­in an exist­ing ware­house. It is non-dis­rup­tive and allows retail­ers to incor­po­rate Snap­Carts into their ful­fil­ment oper­a­tions at their own pace. We have also cre­at­ed a cut-down ver­sion of Snap­Ful­fil, Snap­Pick, which allows ware­house oper­a­tors to use an exist­ing ware­house man­age­ment sys­tem and incor­po­rate the robot­ic Snap­Cart pick­ing solu­tion into their ful­fil­ment process.

How will SnapCart take warehouse efficiency to new levels?

Snap­Ful­fil opti­mis­es the Snap­Cart load­ing in order to “clus­ter” the picks and cre­ate the most effi­cient route to min­imise the trav­el time and the num­ber of pick loca­tions vis­it­ed. Snap­Cart makes the pick­ers far more pro­duc­tive as they are pick­ing, not walk­ing. High­er vol­umes can be processed by the exist­ing work­force and it is also eas­i­er to flex the through­put to accom­mo­date the inevitable peaks and troughs that occur in ecom­merce, such as dur­ing pro­mo­tion­al peri­ods like Black Fri­day. While robots are very good at mov­ing goods autonomous­ly from A to B, it’s impor­tant we still recog­nise humans are bet­ter at activ­i­ties which require flex­i­ble, manip­u­la­tive or dex­ter­ous skills. Our mantra is: the pick­er does the pick­ing, the cart does the walk­ing.

What role will robotics play in the future of supply chain innovation?

Inno­va­tion has nev­er been more required. The sup­ply chain already uses cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy and Synergy’s embrace of robot­ics will make us one of the lead­ers in this are­na. To meet cus­tomer expec­ta­tions for instant sat­is­fac­tion, more micro-ful­fil­ment cen­tres will spring up to short­en the last-mile deliv­ery dis­tance. Syn­er­gy is one of the few ven­dors com­bin­ing hard­ware and soft­ware for an inte­grat­ed, holis­tic solu­tion that can be deployed with min­i­mum dis­rup­tion. It sounds sim­ple, but believe me it is not.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it snapfulfil.com/about-snapcart

Pro­mot­ed by Snap­Cart