Boston Dynamics, creators of the viral dancing robots video just before New Year’s Eve, is making further inroads into the warehouse automation space with the unveiling this week of Stretch, a mobile robot purpose-built for unloading and palletizing and de-palletizing boxes. The company was acquired by Hyundai in December 2020.
3PLs and 4PLs have both seen an explosion in popularity and are now being used to ship all kinds of goods. Each offers big potential benefits for retailers to outsource major elements of their supply chain. Here are some of the main differences between them and pluses and minuses to help you decide which is right for your business.
Big data presents supply chain and ecommerce fulfillment center managers with an unprecedented opportunity to acquire real-time visibility of goods in transit and part of inventory. But this also comes with a set of challenges, not least of which is how to manage the resulting flow of information without becoming drowned in data.
Absolute productivity has declined in many ecommerce fulfillment centers because productivity has not kept up with the rate of increased costs. Some larger companies are paying $18 to $20 per hour in some markets. With this in mind, here are 6 ways to become more efficient and reduce costs in your ecommerce fulfillment operations.
Nimble Robotics, a maker of order picking and packing robots for ecommerce, is the latest fulfillment automation maker to join the massive VC gravy train of late in ecommerce technology, raising $50 million in Series A financing in a round led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures.
Flowspace, a provider of warehouse-on-demand software and services, has raised $31 million in a new round to expand its business and build on capabilities like predictive analytics to help retailers achieve fulfillment network optimization through precise fulfillment hub and inventory positioning.
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Coming after a year of economic contraction and retail disruption, the 2020 peak holiday season threatened to be brutal on retailers. While some retailers had exceptional results, operational challenges limited opportunities. See what a recent study revealed about the impact of pre-peak investments on reducing capability gaps.
Omnichannel operations are the future of brick-and-mortar and DTC retail.
In 2021, will order demand continue at the same volume? How will it change? And how will it impact my labor demand? For many multichannel companies, this means moving toward fulfillment automation in order to decrease the amount of labor and its increasing costs. Here are 2 scenarios where automation was cost justified.
Locus Robotics, a provider of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) for fulfillment warehouses, has raised $150 million in a Series E round, led by Tiger Global Management and Bond, bringing its valuation to the unicorn level north of $1 billion as its business multiplies. The company is looking to expand in Europe and enter APAC in 2022.