McKinsey&Company
Here come the robots
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Better bots. Boxes piling up at front doors in neighborhoods all over the world illustrate a surge in home deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic. To keep parcels moving amid a tight labor market and supply chain crunch, warehouses need more robots—and more cutting-edge, efficient ones, too. The prototype of one such bot looks like a cube on wheels. The robot’s 3-D-printed parts make it much lighter than previous versions, and it can pick 50 items stored in different parts of a warehouse in under five minutes. [Economist] |
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Powered by AI. Due to advances in technology, robotic arms powered by machine learning and AI are increasingly able to handle warehouse tasks typically performed by people, such as sorting apparel and packing supplies. At one sportswear company, robotic arms equipped with cameras and grippers use AI to pick out objects from bins. The robotic arms perform about as accurately as humans but can work for a double shift without resting, said one senior supply chain leader. [WSJ] |
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These bots aren’t made for walking. For retailers, warehouse automation is no longer just nice to have; it’s a must-have for sustainable growth. Large and small companies alike are developing and using new technologies to increase productivity and speed of delivery. Autonomous mobile robots, for example, retrieve and transport items quickly and efficiently, eliminating a significant amount of walking time. One German toy retailer built a warehouse that includes 57 robots that retrieve 3,500 different products from more than 28,000 bins. |
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Billions invested. The warehouse-automation market is expected to reach $51 billion by 2030, with venture-capital funding and private equity fueling a wave of innovation. More than 80% of retailers in apparel, grocery, and other key sectors said that they would increase automation investments over the next two to three years, a recent McKinsey survey revealed. Read about three warehouse archetypes and the automation systems that work best for each—and get a vision of the warehouse of the future. |
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| — Edited by Belinda Yu |
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