Robots In Amazon's Warehouses Are Already Making a Huge Difference (qz.com)

Amazon acquired Kiva, a robotics company for a sum of $775 million in 2012, and started to use robots in its warehouses in late 2014. At the time, the idea was that it will make inventory management more efficient. It's actually doing an impressive job. The "clip to ship" process used to take around 60-75 minutes when human employees were taking care of things, now the robots are doing the same job in 15 minutes. From a Quartz report: These robots are not only more efficient but they also take up less space than their human counterparts. That means warehouse design can eventually be modified to have more shelf space and less wide aisles. At the end of the third quarter of 2015, Amazon was using 30,000 Kiva robots across 13 warehouses. Each Kiva-equipped warehouse can hold 50% more inventory per square foot than centers without robots. In turn, the company's operating costs have been sliced by 20% -- or almost $22 million -- per warehouse. If Kiva robots are dispatched to the rest of the 110 Amazon warehouses, the tech giant could save almost $2.5 billion, according to Deutsche Bank. However, since it takes $15-$20 million to install robots in each warehouse, the one-time savings is expected to be closer to $800 million.

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If you don't know about these robots, BTW, they're quite clever. It's a shame among all these overpriced social media startup acquisitions that Kiva wasn't worth a lot more. Rather that getting hung up on the problem no one has solved yet (picking the part from the bin on the shelf reliably and cheaply), they built a robot to move the whole shelf to a central locations where the humans do the rest. They solved a problem that was practical to solve, and it made a real difference to efficiency.

That problem was actually solved some time ago - for years, Frito-Lay's bigger plants have had automated cranes to grab pallets from the shelves in 10-story warehouses, deposit them into a ground-level circulation conveyor where they're picked up by automated forklifts, then brought to the buffer areas where they're de-palletized and small robots then run the pick boxes to the appropriate place on the picking lines, and the shipping boxes are routed via conveyor automatically to the appropriate loading dock for deadloaded (non-palletized) bulk shipments. For palletized loads, the fork trucks are sent directly to the loading dock. Not all of their plants have the robot forklifts, and in the fully-automated plants they still have man-driven lifts, but even where the manual lifts are still in use they've seen *huge* efficiency gains with the system. The tricky part there is staging the inventory and product flow such that the oldest product always ships first. They're also starting to implement automated loading for the trucks even though an experienced loader is scary-fast.