4 Reasons to Deploy AMRs in E-commerce

According to market observers, global e-commerce sales have increased 26.7% year by year.

The growth of e-commerce is driving an increase in online shopping and fostering the rise of omnichannel retailing. With increasing small orders and the large scale of SKUs, more and more retailers are striving for next-day or same-day delivery, seeking a more efficient way to sort goods with less labour intensity.

The emerging autonomous mobile robots are believed to be the ideal equipment to realize warehouse automation and boost intralogistics efficiency. If you are facing the following situations, don’t hesitate to transform your warehouse operations.

1. Take AMRs to deal with colossal warehouse throughput with high working efficiency

The traditional picking mode in a warehouse heavily relies on manual handling with low working efficiency. To cope with peak seasons, warehouse managers have to employ more operators to pick goods. And all the pickers on site are exhausted since they need to spend lots of time walking and looking for the wanted goods.

However, with AMR goods-to-person solutions, pickers on site just need to stand alongside workstations and wait for mobile robots to transport goods to them. The working strength is lowered and picking efficiency is greatly enhanced.

2. Take AMRs to deal with special promotions and multiple SKUs during peak seasons with 99.99% picking accuracy

The growing number of SKUs, constant demand and drastic peaks require online retailers few pick errors and high productivity. Traditional warehouses are not sufficient to avoid product information missing or pick errors via paper-based picking. Therefore, it is indispensable for warehouses to adopt intelligent warehouse management system to go paperless.

With intuitive interface, Hikrobot self-developed iWMS effectively reduces the return rate with high picking accuracy of up to 99.99%. It seamlessly docks with customers’ upper-level system and allows order picking optimization with intelligent algorithms, such as smart batching and SKU velocity management. The smart batching combines orders with similar SKUs to reduce transportation times of the same rack and improve picking accuracy and outbound delivery efficiency. The SKU velocity management allows robots to put racks with high outbound frequency near the picking station to optimize the outbound strategy and improve the overall work efficiency.

3. Take AMRs to reduce management/operation costs with high field usage rate

With huge amount of orders and a variety of SKUs at one location, the cheapest way for a warehouse to maximize their retail is to provide high storage density and utilize equipment that can efficiently and safely support the picking and outbound delivery tasks.

AMR solutions in the market such as the tote-to-person solutions can effectively improve the storage density and picking efficiency. For example, the Carton Transfer Unit (CTU) from Hikrobot improves the storage density by 80-130% and doubles even triples the picking efficiency.

Due to the rise of gig economy, warehouse managers are having a hard time to find experienced operators and it costs a lot to train them before letting them get hands on the work. Therefore, it is essential for warehouse to deploy an easy-to-use mobile robot solution with intuitive software and reliable robots. Hikrobot RCS and iWMS are easy for greeners to get familiar with. Moreover, operators can always feel safe to work with Hikrobot AMRs since they are all equipped with 360° safety protection and intelligent obstacle avoidance ability.

4. Cover all the complicated scenarios in e-commerce with one single AMR suppliers

Although there are various mobile robots in the market to help with the transportation and picking tasks in e-commerce warehouses, online retailers still need to get AMR solutions from different suppliers.

To save your efforts, Hikrobot have a variety of AMRs like Latent Mobile Robot (LMR), Forklift Mobile Robot (FMR), Carton Transfer Unit (CTU), etc., covering 30kg to 2000kg material handling tasks. All of the robots can be under cluster control of the self-developed robot control system (RCS), realizing optimal task allocation, multi-robots path planning, traffic management, etc. With Hikrobot, online retailers are able to customize their warehouse automation solutions with different kinds of AMRs to cover their diverse application scenarios.