Rob Thyen

The global market for warehousing is estimated to total over $400 billion, but less than 5% of that market is automated. However, the increasing complexity of supply chains, along with increasing pressure on profitability from rising costs and competition for customers and labor, has created demand for warehouses with tech ecosystems — networks of robotics and software designed to optimize safety, efficiency and profitability.

In 2023, an example of such a tech ecosystem was launched in the U.S. The site includes one of the largest deployments of robotics in logistics and an industry-first combination of state-of-the-art automation. The technology solutions were selected to optimize returns operations, also known as reverse logistics, for a consumer electronics company, and custom-designed to handle a high rate of throughput at minimal cost, while increasing accuracy and productivity, lowering costs, and raising profitability for the customer. The warehouse is capable of processing 50,000 electronic devices per day with technology that can pick a specific item from over 2 million pieces of inventory in seconds.

This session will highlight the different types of technology — including automated storage and retrieval robots, robotic arms, GTP robots, as well as data analytics, many of them industry-first implementations — and how they were strategically integrated to create a state-of-the-art tech-ecosystem at this warehouse of the future.