To keep up the trend of digital transformation and technology innovation in the logistics sector, CIRRO Fulfillment managed to start operations in the Intelligent AMR Warehouses in the UK and US East in 2021. So far, hundreds of thousands of robots have been running fast among the shelves in these fulfillment centers for almost one year, carrying and handling parcels of all sizes. Up to 10,000 parcels per warehouse can be delivered a day.
Importance of operational optimization with Autonomous Mobile Robots
Europe’s supply chain has been rocked by wave after wave of strikes, involving at least 150,000 workers in the UK alone.
Labor costs in Europe and the United States have been soaring. With the “difficulty in worker recruitment” and “resignation waves” after the epidemic and the arrival of a society with an aging population and stricter employment standards, the entire cross-border industry is facing a contradiction between the increasing labor demand and scarce global labor resources with more expensive costs.
The traditional way of providing logistics services gradually becomes unable to cope with the status quo. Therefore, logistics companies, especially the ones focusing on fulfillment services, have been enthusiastic about intelligence transformation in recent years.
Challenges to the technological innovation
The application of new technologies is more comprehensive than was expected. Doesn’t the fulfillment company want to enhance its competitiveness through technological innovation? Certainly not.
Intelligent warehousing seems to be more like a “new attempt” rather than a necessity from the perspective of brand owners and e-commerce sellers. They need to see tangible progress brought by these technologies. “Can Intelligent Warehouses make global warehousing service more efficient? Will it reduce my logistics cost? “
Thus, from the very beginning, CIRRO Fulfillment has clarified that the first principle is to make Intelligent Warehouses meet customers’ needs and empower customers.
How CIRRO Fulfillment leads the way?
Since 2021, CIRRO Fulfillment has been divided into two teams to upgrade the intelligent warehousing service.
One team is responsible for building professional, intelligent warehouses based on the different types of products equipped with integrated logistics automatic robots and intelligent management systems.
Another team adopts robotic technology to assist or replace human operations in critical links, based on the existing layout of the warehouse and existing manual operation procedures, and “Human” + “Machine” have complementary advantages, continuously improving efficiency and customer experience.
An overview of Intelligent AMR Warehouses in the UK, the US, and Germany
Advantages of CIRRO Fulfillment Intelligent’AMR Warehouses
Taking the first Intelligent Warehouse of CIRRO Fulfillment in the UK as an example, the core equipment in the warehouse consists of automatic sorting workstations, automobile base-jack robots, smart shelves, and Intelligent WMS.
In each step, from inbound storage to order picking, automatic robots act as human hands and feet, providing more efficient and standard services to complete a lot of intensive, heavy, and repetitive labor. At the same time, the WMS works behind it, acting as a human brain and eyes, ensuring that each order is accurately fulfilled and traceable with instant and transparent logistics information.
In the process of put-away, after the goods enter the warehouse and the routine operations such as checking and quality inspection are completed, the most time-consuming and error-prone steps, including put-away, handling, storage, etc., in the past are all taken over by automatic robots.
Under the guidance of WMS, the automobile base-jack robots can easily carry up to 600 kg of products and quickly transport the parcels to the designated location for storage based on the best route and parcel attributes matched by the system. The whole inbound process is automatically completed. As a result, human efficiency increased by 50%, and put-away speed nearly doubled.
Traditionally, the outbound process, especially to find products in the storage area manually, is incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive. While in CIRRO Fulfillment’s Intelligent Warehouse in the UK, the automobile base-jack robots can sort the parcels quickly and accurately according to the system positioning and then send them automatically to the workstation for processing. It becomes 2-3 times faster, and human errors are also avoided, increasing the order accuracy rate to 99.9%.
In the past, out-of-hours orders were not processed until the next day due to strict restrictions under global employment standards. Nowadays, if the customer has urgent demand for shipment, the robot can continue to work 24 hours a day and process the orders at night so that they can be delivered the early next day when the truck arrives. “Trucks waiting for products” has become “products waiting for trucks.”
CIRRO Fulfillment has provided that the application of Intelligent Warehouses achieves win-win results. The fulfillment centers have enhanced human efficiency and optimized service quality:
- Automatic robots to speed up put-away and improve outbound effectiveness;
- 24h operations to ensure the flexibility of customer order processing;
- Digital warehousing to guarantee the accuracy of inventory and order processing;
- Intelligent warehousing and distribution to provide transparent and visual logistics information.