The Challenge
As a 3PL partner for a premium retail brand, ITG must handle extreme seasonal volatility — where fulfillment volumes can surge overnight during events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In a high-density, narrow aisle mezzanine environment, manual fulfillment operations alone could not sustain the throughput, accuracy, and service levels required during peak periods. Deploying traditional fixed automation would have locked ITG into rigid workflows and limited its ability to scale operations dynamically.
The Solution
To maintain operational agility while scaling throughput, ITG implemented flexible warehouse automation with Locus Robotics. Now, Locus robots assist associates with both picking and replenishment tasks, while LocusONE® analyzes operational data in real-time to orchestrate an efficient loop for picking, putaway, and to balance work across the mezzanine floor.
The Results
Within the first year of operation, the facility achieved more than:
- 2 million units picked
- 140,000 orders processed
- 100,000 replenishment orders executed
- All in a narrow-aisle mezzanine layout.
With Locus Robotics, ITG has the operational flexibility it needs to boost productivity, flex capacity during peaks, support associates, and access real-time visibility to respond to demand. And with ongoing optimization, performance has improved by an additional 35% since go-live. The result is a fulfillment operation designed to scale dynamically with no capacity lock-in — enabling ITG to absorb demand spikes, support its workforce, and maintain service levels even during extreme peak periods.
We work in a super seasonal environment, which means that we have insane volume peaks around Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Then we have valleys, then peaks again when new seasonal goods come in from our customers. And it’s super difficult to steer this only through employees. That’s where Locus Robotics helps us scale up and down through the intelligent RaaS model. It’s significantly more flexible than relying on a fixed automation system.