A slew of new automation specialists appear on the warehouse battlefield.
It was Amazon that drove America’s warehouse operators into the robot business.
Quiet Logistics, which ships apparel out of its Devens, Mass., warehouse, had been using robots made by a company called Kiva Systems. When Amazon bought Kiva in 2012, Quiet hired scientists. In 2015 it spun out a new company called Locus Robotics, which raised $8 million in venture capital. Last year, Locus unveiled its own warehouse robotics solution called the LocusBot—first using it for its own business, then selling them to companies that ship everything from housewares to auto parts. Now, Locus has landed a bigger fish: It’s selling its robots to DHL Supply Chain (a unit of Deutsche Post DHL Group), the world’s largest third-party logistics company. DHL will use the machines at a Memphis, Tenn., location to help ship surgical devices to operating rooms across the country.
To do that, Locus’s software directs a LocusBot to a shelf where the specific item is located. A human worker meets it there, reads a description of the item off an iPad, and drops it into a plastic bucket mounted on the machine. The idea is that the robot does the majority of the traveling, while the worker simply patrols a specified zone.
“The first trend was to try to replace humans,” said Rick Faulk, chief executive of Locus. “Now it’s about humans and robots working collaboratively.” The sticker price on a LocusBot is $35,000.
At the Quiet Logistics warehouse, the robots shorten the distance a warehouse worker travels on a typical day from 14 miles to less than 5 miles, Faulk said. The robots, meanwhile, park themselves directly in front of the shelf that the worker is supposed to pick from, decreasing the risk the human will pick the wrong item. That makes the job easier, and is appealing to employees. “Working with robots is a fun thing to do,” Faulk said.
What that means for warehouse humans is an open question. There were 939,000 people working in the industry in February, up 44 percent over the past 10 years, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rise of e-commerce has created a need for more hands to pick items and pack boxes. Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc.’s rapid shipping times have taught customers to expect goods on their doorstep in two days or less, fueling a warehouse boom as retailers scramble to amass distribution hubs closer to their shoppers.
Logistics firms can have a hard time hiring enough people, particularly during peak shopping seasons. Adding robots should ease some of the seasonal shortages, and may make the work less physically demanding. Working conditions at U.S. warehouses are often scrutinized for their grueling nature: Pickers complain of exhausting shifts, sometimes in oppressive heat or biting cold. Many of the jobs are temporary, fluctuating with the shopping calendar.
Across the economy, almost 25 million jobs will be lost to automation in the next 10 years, while the new technology will create 15 million jobs, according to research firm Forrester. In the logistics business, smarter warehouse bots will likely reduce the number of people it takes to run a fulfillment center. “I don’t think people are investing in automation because of a near-term labor shortage,” said Karl Siebrecht, CEO at Flexe, a Seattle-based company that bills itself as the Airbnb of warehouse space. “It’s about improving productivity. Fundamentally, that means people will be replaced.” Source: Bloomberg
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Ability of broker-like service to organize the capacity of various independent shops provided for low-cost domestic production.Manufacturing portal MakeTime sees hidden capacity in U.S. machining businesses. It is the higher-end capabilities such as five-axis machining currently seeing high demand, the company says. Meanwhile, frequently in those very same shops, simpler milling and turning machines sit unused. Taken as a whole, the unused capacity waiting in shops throughout the country is like a whole other outsource nation, albeit one within the United States. And in the case of the parts seen in this photo, that virtual outsource nation won business from a real outsource nation, China.
MakeTime is like a broker for machining services, connecting open capacity in U.S. shops with machining buyers. Director of Business Operations Ryan Kelly says the parts shown were made for an aftermarket automotive accessories company. They had been sourced from China, but the overseas sourcing necessitated large order quantities and came with unreliable timing on deliveries. The buyer was therefore open to alternatives. “The customer came to us with no time constraints, so we approached this project with the idea that we’d get the parts made as cheaply as possible,” Mr. Kelly says. After distributing the job among various shops, MakeTime collected production data from them to identify the shops able to make the part most efficiently. When the cost-effectiveness of this ultimate set of suppliers was combined with savings in logistics and carrying costs, the result “brought the final costs in line with Chinese prices,” he says. Source: Modern Machine Shop |
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