Locus Robotics

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3PL Case Study

Amware

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“Having seen Locus Robotics used at another facility, it was a no-brainer to bring Locus here since we'd seen it used on an even larger scale.”

Austin Feagins, Senior Director of Customer Solutions

Amware Fullfilment

Overview & Challenge

Amware Fulfillment specializes in high volume, ecommerce fulfillment services. Their nationwide fulfillment warehouse network of 18 3PL fulfillment centers across the U.S. minimizes costly, high-zone moves and gets product moving to customers faster. Amware is part of Staci Group, Europe’s leading multi-channel fulfillment provider. Staci’s 78-facility fulfillment network extends across the U.S. and 7 European countries. 

Their Lawrenceville, GA facility focuses on fulfillment for consumer goods products, including tumblers, glassware, coolers, and vacuum-sealed bottles. The facility has a very large footprint due to the products they carry, and associates would walk roughly four to five miles each day in the warehouse pulling heavy carts that could hold anywhere from 30 to 100 pounds of product. 

Order picking accuracy was also top of mind for Amware, with 3,000 different products stored in the facility and an additional 8,000 to 10,000 variations of those products due to colors and branding. 

When Amware was looking for an automation solution, they wanted one that would require little to no CapEx investment and be flexible and adaptable. Austin Feagins, Senior Director of Customer Solutions at Amware Fulfillment, had previously worked at a facility that had the best solution for them.

Critical Factors for Implementing Warehouse Automation

Improve UPH

Peak Season

Labor

Results

Locus deployed a warehouse execution platform and 20 autonomous mobile robots (known as “cobots”) along with a suite of dashboards and actionable reporting tools for Amware in their Lawrenceville, GA facility. 

The team praised Locus Robotics for the quick implementation time. With other solutions they were considering, they found that it would take many months of prep and start-up to try and get even one piece of automation in the building, let alone have a full fleet of cobots operating within 3-4 weeks like they received with Locus Robotics. Feagins noted that implementation was a breeze thanks to the sales engineering team, who were easy to work with and tweaked the design to be what Amware needed. 

Another high point for Locus was the robots-as-aservice (RaaS) subscription model for the monthly OpEx costs, as well as the flexibility to scale up or down as needed during changing order volume times like peak. 

During the non-peak season, the cobots have improved efficiency at Amware. The facility saw a 35% year over year performance improvement in the first month alone after bringing on the cobots, and a 3x improvement in picking efficiency. 

The cobots create an easy environment for associates, who know where to go for the next pick by looking at the display screen after a pick is completed. The display screen also shows the text in each associate’s preferred language, which is a huge bonus with 60-80% of the pickers having Spanish as their native language.

“We intended to have a throughput of 2,500 to 3,000 orders per day. During the peak season, we fulfilled 5,000 to 7,000 orders per day and increased our peak units per hour (UPH) to 136% with our cobots.”
Austin Feagins
Senior Director of Customer Solutions, Amware Fulfillment

3x

Improvement in picking time

35%

YoY performance improvement within one month

+

Improved training time

+

Improved employee safety

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