Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 3.51
…This is happening across a range of industries, including apparel, general merchandise, health and beauty, and pharmaceutical distributors. “Given the current economic climate, the push to further automate manual put walls is happening more prominently within projects that improve the efficiency and throughput of brownfield sites,” explained Fry. “Rather than building net-new facilities from the ground up, companies are looking to retrofit their current manual order sortation or put wall footprint with new robotic solutions to gain efficiency and cut costs.” With automated put walls, a robot arm picks up a single item from multi-SKU totes and then scans and…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 2.86
…for familiar names in the premium branded fashion and apparel industry like Bonobos, Zara and Mack Weldon. Start with a walk through of a 300,000-square-foot distribution center near the Fort Devens Army Base in Devens, Mass. There, some 200 orange Kiva robots shuttle 5,000 shelving units from a storage area to picking stations where order selectors fill orders. As one of the early adopters of mobile robotics for e-commerce fulfillment, Quiet has been using Kiva since 2009. And while the leading edge is called the bleeding edge for a reason, Bruce Welty, Quiet’s co-founder and CEO, says that getting out…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 2.55
…times, improve productivity and cut operating costs (Santagate 2018). Apparel: Sewbots are helping to decrease costs and promote worker safety in the clothing supply chain. These robots are a combination of artificial intelligence, robotics and 3D printing (Lennane 2018). Once sewbots are implemented, customers can interact with them via an app to order custom-made clothing. The app receives a picture of the customer, discerns the exact body measurements, sends the data to the nearest sewbot plant, and then directs the sewbot to create the customized article of clothing. It is expected that this technology will shorten supply chains and reduce…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 2.44
…it wanted to double the picking productivity of women’s apparel by its workforce. And that’s exactly what happened. But as Kevin Stock, senior vice president of engineering, explains, the benefits didn’t stop there. The initial 30-robot installation also included: working collaboratively with the existing workforce; simplifying the job, reducing travel distances, increasing job satisfaction, and reducing training times. The overall success of the 90-day pilot was so impressive that GEODIS plans to roll out a total of 175 robots from Locus Robotics across four locations by mid-2019. Since the launch of the original pilot in October 2017, a total of…
Found in Robotics News & Content, with a score of 2.18
…“bracketing.” This practice is familiar in the fashion and apparel space and it exists outside of the ecommerce channel. Say a customer is buying the latest New Balance cross trainers, but they’re unsure of the fit. They typically wear a size 10, but they go ahead and buy the 9.5 and 10.5 as well to see which fits best, and then return the unwanted items. Nowadays, this behavior manifests around everything from shoes to coffeemakers. Optimizing the reverse logistics process - most commonly done by putting in place a convenient Buy Online, Return in Store (BORIS) process - is the…