We make the "uglies" beautiful

With the growing consumer demand to purchase goods online rather than in a physical store, the complexity for the whole e-commerce business is rapidly increasing. And the mass customization where part numbers are increasing for manufacturers and a never ending pressure to shorten product life cycles creates huge challenges for intralogistics.

I listened to the Robot Report Podcast with Mike Oitzman interviewing Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk today. I found it particularly interesting when Rick answered the question on what Waypoint would bring to their business (Locus just recently acquired Waypoint). He talked about the fact that customers have been asking for AMRs carrying heavier loads and bulkier loads.

This is the trend we have been foreseeing ever since we started with our Motorized Cart Vision. That is; in the future all load carriers for parts movement and presentation will be motorized and automated.

But I am confident it will not be possible to solve with the current AMR solutions in the market. There must be a greater focus on the application to efficiently present the material rather than to maintain the focus on the technology to navigate and move standard loads.

The variety of parts to move and the heavier loads has been the challenge for the manufacturing industry for a long time already. For the manufacturing industry the challenge is also nowadays about the quantity of material that needs to be transported within the plants. More automation is needed in order to stay competitive.

The manufacturing plants are becoming more and more like huge warehouses and the warehouses on the other hand instead tackles the challenge of becoming more and more like a manufacturing plant.

With our modular and robust concept to create material handling carts we have since 2010 created more than 5000 unique cart designs to almost 900 customers in 33 countries.

Why would the customers require more than 5000 unique designs unless the needs vary that much?

AMR providers have for a long time focused on automating the processes within warehouse and distribution rather than in manufacturing plants, as it used to evolve around standard dimensions and weights. That is now about to change.

The e-commerce trend at the moment is that consumers started to order more than books, clothes and skin care products like they used too. We have started to order bulky sports products, heavy furniture and toys in many different sizes and shapes which creates a much more challenging environment for e-commerce businesses.

At FlexQube we have an efficient design process using a standardized modular concept to create the unique solutions required by the manufacturing industry. As of this year we have added AGV and AMR building blocks to the same portfolio and design process . That means we can within hours design and quote an AMR in a specific size and with a specific top structure .

I am confident the users in the distribution industry will also request customized AMR solutions, exactly like they have been doing for mechanical carts to other industries for some time (for seats, windshields, bumpers, hoses and so forth). And they want these to be deployed fast and at the same cost as standard AMR solutions.

So make your growing amount of odd shaped parts, the "uglies", become the beutiful ones and make it possible to handle these in an efficient and safe way. Get started with FlexQube.

Anders Fogelberg