Question

What are two examples on how technology has improved the operations at Symbotic?

Answer 1

Symbotic uses a disruptive and technological superior approach to automating warehouses that enables manufacturers, retailers and distributors to significantly simplify operations and reduce costs while increasing their ability to sort, store and distribute materials with high degrees of speed, accuracy, and customization.

Symbotic is a leading provider of proprietary, autonomous robotics and innovative software based solutions that reinvent distribution centers. The Symbotic System uses a flexible and modular framework, autonomous robots and an integrated software system to reduce costs, simplify operations, and increase storage density within existing infrastructures. The result is an automated material handling and storage solution that is fast and affordable to setup, inexpensive to operate and flexible to change. The Symbotic System can be installed with minimal disruption to the conventional operating warehouse and is built to reimagine future growth. It has autonomous mobile robotic-based solution for reinventing conventional warehouses Symbotic has receieved an award as 2016’s Innovative Technology of the Year for Robotics by the Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC).

Emerging Technology Trends that has helped Sybmotic:- Market drivers such as increased labor and fuel costs have encouraged innovation, with new technologies enabling an emerging market for fully automated warehouses capable of fulfilling highly mixed SKU orders.

The most important new technologies are in three areas.

1. Advanced Software – divides each customer order into discrete pallets, each being a complex 3D “puzzle” subject to various stacking rules, and selected from inventories of more than 10,000 SKU’s. Complementary software then generates unique robot motion programs to build the pallets.
2. Mobile Robots – and other innovative technologies are addressing the need to pick individual SKU’s from a storage structure and deliver the outbound items in a defined, specific sequence in order to build the pallets robotically. These new approaches overcome the rate limitations of traditional crane-based mini-load ASRS.
3. Technological Scalability – these systems are scalable to unprecedented levels, with many hundreds of rovers delivering many thousands of cases per hour.