Problem
NRI is a 3PL that specializes in fulfilling premium apparel, footwear, accessories and select goods throughout North America. The company maintains 18 warehouses and ships up to 370,000 units during peak periods.
As the company has grown, NRI adopted autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to supplement its workforce and scale further. It uses AMRs from both 6 River Systems (now a part of Ocado Group) and Locus Robotics.
However, building custom integrations in-house to deploy a heterogenous fleet of AMRs with NRI’s existing WMS, Aspire, comes with high costs, both in development and in ongoing maintenance. Additionally, as a 3PL, it needed a solution that could easily adapt and scale as the business needs changed.
“NRI was connecting to each robotics’ API directly,” says Nicole Backmeyer, Director of Software Development at NRI. “And because each API structure was different, it required manipulation and re-mapping on our side. NRI understood that scalability with new robotics was not sustainable for our team. Cost of overhead and development was increasing, and to ensure our ability to grow in the future was sustained, we looked at other options.”
Solution
SVT Robotics (SVT) integrated 6RS and Locus Robotics with the existing WMS using pre-built and reusable integrations using its SOFTBOT Platform. NRI said this level of speed and ease of integration made all the difference for its IT teams.
“Our last rollout [working with SVT] was within weeks, versus the first robot rollout that we did ourselves, which took us over six months of writing to the API and writing out the different test scenarios, etc.,” says Sunny Bagri, vice president of technology at NRI.
Results
Efficiencies with staffing were another benefit. “We went from needing multiple developers, down to one developer to help people through test scenarios versus actually writing code,” Bagri says. “From a business standpoint, it gets us to an ROI a lot quicker because you’re able to start using the solution a lot quicker.”
With the AMRs integrated, everything changed for NRI’s warehouse teams.
“We’ve seen a lot of improvement,” says Anna Anido, general manager at NRI’s Ontario, Calif facility. “We’ve seen about a 160% gain in productivity.”
Anido notes that, before using the AMRs, her team’s biggest challenge was keeping up with service level agreements SLAs. Now, with the AMRs in place, her associates can easily stay on top of same-day orders and better prioritize them.
“We recognized right away that SVT approaches business the same way we do,” says Ryan Dale-Johnson, vice president of business development at NRI. “It was clear that we were talking to people who had done the job before and had done it well. We’re very confident in their resume.”
SVT Robotics helped NRI to improve multiple KPIs, including;
- Accelerate integration and deployment from 6 months to 2 weeks.
- Reduce downtime with monitoring and automated alerting.
- Deploy multiple AMR solutions to support different business needs.
“The KPIs shot up by ten units per hour,” says NRI supervisor Robert Jorge. “Multiply that by the associates and hours, and our picking rate has just skyrocketed.”
The improvements in output also came with a boost in worker comfort, safety, and overall workplace satisfaction. “The morale of the team has definitely increased,” says Fernando Vila, another OFP supervisor at the warehouse. “The ability to retain talent here, with the introduction of the bots, is something we haven’t had before.”
For a 3PL like NRI, the time between a consumer’s order and delivery is a differentiator for its clients. “Any way that we can shorten the timeline for our customers improves the market perception of their brand,” says Dale-Johnson. “It honestly really does trickle down, all the way to consumer experience as far as value-add goes.”
With SVT’s help, NRI can set and meet ambitious delivery goals, and present attractive added value to clients. “Knowing in our head how improved the timeline is … allows us to be much more confident, and ideally, help win that business too,” says Dale-Johnson.
The integration of the AMRs in the WMS was only one of the benefits. NRI has also improved:
- Monitoring – support teams are alerted to issues before they have a significant impact on production.
- Agility – using reports and analytics, NRI is able to pivot when business needs change.
- Scaling – NRT can now bring new facilities online much more efficiently.