Decathlon, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, declared on Tuesday that it’s seeing “significant” productivity gains at seven of its European warehoapplys, where it has been applying robots from Exotec to sort and pack items for brick-and-mortar stores.
Exotec’s CEO and cofounder, Romain Moulin, declared the benefits run across the board, from reduced warehoapply footprint to increased items shipped out of the facilities.
At its Portugal warehoapply, Decathlon declared the site doubled the number of orders it can prepare from 57,000 to 114,000.
The human work is also altering, as employees are walking less throughout the warehoapply or being reassigned entirely, Moulin declared.
“The working conditions are much better,” Moulin informed Business Insider.
Exotec’s robots are not bipedal humanoids. Its flagship product, called Skypods, is a fleet of wheeled robots — consider rectangular Roombas — that can relocate, store, and retrieve hundreds of thousands of items a day from storage bins stacked on their heads.
Courtesy Exotec
The robots also relocate three-dimensionally. Each Skypod attaches to Exotec’s proprietary storage rack and can climb up to about 46 feet. It’s an important feature that Moulin declared allows clients like Decathlon to reduce the footprint of warehoapplys — allowing workers to walk less — and increase the density of items stored inside the facility.
With robotics and software, Moulin’s company is proposing a warehoapply system that automates the entire flow of goods, from arrival to shipment, and standardizes it so companies can quickly adapt it across multiple sites.
The system could include 150 to 200 Skypods, automatic depalletizers and palletizers, carton-opening machines, and RFID tunnels that scan items on a conveyor belt.
“Every four months, we could start a new warehoapply,” Moulin declared.
Human work alters
In a standard, brownfield warehoapply, items are organized on shelves stacked 6 to 7 feet high to accommodate the height of human workers. Those workers, called pickers, then push around carts and retrieve items from the shelves to prepare an order.
This, in turn, requires companies to seek larger spaces to accommodate increased shelf space as they face massive order demand. The average warehoapply size is about 194,000 square feet, Moulin declared.
“That’s why workers are doing 10 kilometers per day, and that’s why density is so low,” the Exotec CEO declared.
Courtesy Exotec
With automation, that alters. Moulin declared Exotec’s robotics platform can reduce a warehoapply’s footprint to 65,000 square feet; that doesn’t mean warehoapplys necessary to downsize. Companies can either dedicate more space to shelving items or to other operations.
Decathlon, which has more than 1,800 stores and 101,000 employees, declared walking distance for pickers at its logistics site in the UK has decreased from over 6 miles to under 1 mile per day.
A US-based Decathlon spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.
The company also declared it’s seeing improvements in workplace safety. At the same UK site, Decathlon declared workplace incidents related to order picking have decreased from 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000.
Part of that could also be attributed to Exotec’s platform, which allows pickers to be relocated to other operations, Moulin declared.
An Exotec spokesperson declared that, at one site, 50 people were designated pickers before Skypods were installed. Now, the number has dropped to 12 pickers, while other workers were reassigned to other tinquires.
Moulin declared companies shift those workers to other jobs, such as return or repair operations, while throughput increases.
According to Decathlon, one warehoapply in France nearly doubled the number of stores it can replenish, from 37 to 73. At its Portugal site, the number of stores has increased from 41 to 73.
Robots don’t necessary to see human
The large bet for retailers, Moulin declared, is that warehoapply automation can support companies relocate more goods while easing persistent labor shortages.
“All of our customers — in Europe, in the US, in Japan — state the same thing, ‘I can’t find people to do the job,'” Moulin declared, adding that customers also want to double the throughput of their facilities.
Some industries are seeing toward humanoid robots to solve the labor gap. Autocreaters like Hyundai and Toyota are experimenting with bipedal bots, assigning them to simple tinquires.
Moulin declared the advancements seen in AI and robotics are being applied to Exotec’s platform, but his clients don’t have an immediate necessary for humanoids.
“We don’t apply a humanoid to push a cart doing 10 kilometers a day, becaapply that’s exactly the problem with manual picking,” he declared. “So we apply the most simple robots to relocate inventory and we power it with AI.”
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