Geek Plus Robotics claims to have installed one of the largest automated warehouses in Asia.
The supplier of autonomous mobile robots co-operated with Yunji, an e-commerce company, to launch robotics-intensive warehouse in Kunshan, China, to establish what it calls a “super-robotic warehouse”.
The facility stores a series of commodity categories including apparel, bags, cosmetics, and similar products. (See video below.)
Racks and pallets are combined with the operation mode waving-picking and goods-to-person picking system.
Yunji Technology is a mobile internet company specializing in e-commerce platform research and development, integration, operation and service.
As a branch, Yunji app is a social retailing platform which provides services such merchandise, logistics, IT, training, and after-sale service through cloud resources sharing, so that ordinary people are given the access to business with ease.
After two years of development, Yunji has helped more than 4 million people start a social retailing business with single daily sales volumes of up to RMB 278 million ($42 million).
A huge number of online orders have put enormous pressure on Yunji’s warehousing and logistics, while the ever-increasing labor cost and the bottlenecks of efficiency increment have become resistant factors for logistics timeliness.
Under this circumstance, Geek Plus has been dedicated to solving the pain points and problems of warehousing and logistics through robotics technology.
The full-flow intelligent warehouse system from Geek Plus Robotics aims for e-commerce platform that features in massive SKU and fragmentary orders.
Its “goods-to-person” picking system is able to complete the picking task automatically, improve efficiency and save labor costs.
Geek Plus’ “Super Robotic Warehouse”, based in Kunshan, is a large-scale, full-flow semi-unmanned warehouse.
It comprises of four sections: high-density storage area; putaway-picking area; and two “goods-to-person” areas, functioning as inbound warehousing, putaway, picking, outbound delivery and storage, as well as providing e-commerce clients with full-process warehousing and logistics services.
High-density storage area
The pallet racks in high-density storage area are about nine meters high, can be applied in the whole pallet and bulk commodity storage.
In this area, self-driving forklift and traditional forklift work alongside to form an AS / RS system.
In the future, self-driving forklift can be combined with Geek Moving Robot to complete a high-degree automation while forklifts place the pallets on the robots, then robots transport the pallets to the putaway area or outbound delivery area.
Robot picking area
There are two robot picking areas in this warehouse, both are deployed “goods-to-person” system.
Putaway and picking area
During 5.16 promotion period, the picking efficiency of each workstation has reached a benchmark of 400 pieces/hour, which is equivalent to 3 times of manual picking efficiency.
Only 96 people work in this warehouse saving 70 per cent manual cost than before.
In addition, the robots can be implemented on demand. According to the increase in the volume of online orders, the number of robots increased to 300 units from 150 units before the promotion, fully demonstrating the benefit of robots’ flexibility.
The warehouse of the future
The warehousing and logistics industry has always been considered as a labor-intensive industry, and known for tedious and exhausting workload.
However, as China’s demographic dividend gradually disappears, labor costs increase year by year. On the other hand, more and more orders need handling, being a challenge for warehouse operators to meet rapidly changing markets, especially in peak seasons during promotion.
In addition, traditional warehousing automation equipment is often hard to cope with rapid beats of production and order fulfillment, and high costs are beyond many enterprises’ affordability.
Thus robotics intelligent logistics solutions come into being. Compared with traditional automation solution, robotics logistics solution is more efficient, more accurate and more flexible, and suitable for a variety of warehousing scenarios driven by robots and a complete set of scheduling system.
Geek Plus Super Robot Warehouse covers the whole process of warehousing applications including AS / RS, high-density storage, intelligent picking system, intelligent moving system, intelligent sorting system.
With the rise of new retailing, intelligent logistics has gradually transformed into an intelligent supply chain, focusing on proving full-range logistics service which can be called “4PL”.
It integrates the capability of management consulting and 3PL service providers, and brings added value to the entire supply chain with flexibility and agility.
Flexible supply chain refers to the production line and the supply chain can be switched freely between customization, small batches, and large batches, but no big change to delivery time and cost.
Nowadays the market life cycle time is getting shorter and shorter. To satisfy the rapidly changing market demand, agile supply chain will be definitely the key solution to catch up with the trend.
There are three major elements to make intelligent supply chain an ultimate commercialization: data, algorithm, and products.
The first step is to generate data to realize the initialization process which is essential though usually costs a lot.
Then optimize the algorithms with data and finally accomplish the product – ultimate business intelligence.
Geek Plus empowers the supply chain through robot technology, precise control of orders and platforms, fast response to reach a speedy flow of commercial value and create a real intelligent supply chain model for the future.
