The Future of Augmented Fulfillment is Robotics

As a key component in eCommerce, the fast, accurate, and cost-effective fulfillment of consumer orders is paramount for ongoing Direct To Consumer business success.

In fact, it’s becoming even clearer by the day that for brands, retailers, and 3PLs to remain competitive, fulfillment logistics operators now need to augment their current operations.

How can your current fulfillment operations be augmented to become faster, stronger, and more effective?

It’s extremely important for business leaders to understand the critical factors of speed, cost, accuracy, and even the customer delivery experience benefits available when you augment fulfillment.

Now, I’ll share with you the five ways that you can augment your fulfillment workforce with AMRs.

Workforce Augmentation

Simply stated, the addition of multiple collaborative Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) into your fulfillment workforce can deliver these five benefits to your eCommerce operations:

1. Speed – Typically, order timing and turnaround improves by 40% to 50% following the introduction of AMRs to fulfillment operations.
2. Accuracy – Fulfillment errors can destroy customer trust and be very costly to rectify. AMR-led pick processes have been shown to improve order accuracy by near to 100%!
3. Productivity – Significant productivity can be expected through the collaborative implementation of AMRs with your warehouse associates. Rates of 100% to 200% productivity improvements have been confirmed across well over 200 operations to date.
4. Safety – Due to the reduction of ergonomic stress and strain on eCommerce order pickers pulling and pushing heavy order carts, as well as built in collision avoidance technology, AMRs show a strong reduction in fulfillment center accidents as well as significantly reduced absenteeism and attrition.
5. Training – In operations utilizing AMR-led pick processes, training is enhanced in a number of ways. Intuitive screens lead the picker through the picking and confirmation process each time. So, with minimal initial guidance from an experienced picker, new recruits can quickly get up to speed and operate productively, often in under five minutes.

Training augmentation, such as the above, is incredibly important, especially in rapidly growing eCommerce operations. I can personally attest to this, as one time our eCommerce order volume jumped 10X from 6,500 orders a day to 65,000 orders a day with no warning. In this scenario, one of the toughest tasks was training the many new order pickers we required in short order. As you can imagine, being able to do this in less than five minutes with a bot-led process would have helped us significantly!

Robots help augment your warehouse and eCommerce fulfillment workforce through improved speed, accuracy, training, safety, and productivity. Learn more about the benefits of AMRs and you’ll see how to increase worker productivity, lower your labor costs, and seamlessly scale as your fulfillment needs change.