Removal of the conveyor eased access for employees, who no longer needed to walk around long stretches of conveyors, and it reduced ambient noise. The company said the throughput level could be scaled up higher in the future by adding more robots.Īnother benefit is that removal of the old system reclaimed 13% of the fulfillment center’s floor space. With just three robots, the Zebra system is capable of processing up to 25% more orders per day than the previous fixed automation. They then return the empty carts back to the carousel. The CartConnect AMRs are scheduled to pick up loaded order carts every 20 minutes and then deliver the payload to the putwall. Waytek uses a handful of them to automate the transport of dunnage and recycling, though most are used to transport order totes to the put wall or to automatically move goods from receiving to drop off to the carousels. The robots can position themselves under rolling mobile carts with shelves called FetchCarts to transport totes or materials. It consists of three Fetch CartConnect100 AMRs. Waytek’s AMR fleet was fully installed and operational in three days. “They are able to multi-task while saving us floor space.” “The AMRs drop off the inbound goods at the carousels and order totes from the carousels go the putwalls for packing on the AMRs,” said Mike Larson, chief operating officer and co-owner of Waytek. The AMRs also replaced a manual process for removal of dunnage and recycling. Not only did the cloud-based Fetch system replace of the conveyor, it has also taken over for associates bringing goods from receiving to the carousels for replenishment. That led the company to explore Fetch robots from Zebra Technologies that could be used in the place of the conveyor. Waytek wanted to keep its carousels and decided to look into putwalls to sort orders and use mobile robots as an alternative to conveyor to transport orders. Increasing capacity would have required a major redesign of the existing conveyor, interrupting operations. sortation loop that could hold 100 order totes at a time. The conveyor sortation system was designed to sort 800 orders per day. However, Waytek's existing warehouse technology, which included two separate horizontal carousel systems for storage and order picking, and the conveyor system, was about to reach its limits. Order volumes quickly grew as a result of e-commerce growth and orders from existing customers. With a rise in component demand across the manufacturing sector combined with a tight labor market, Waytek found itself in the midst of challenging times by 2020. This conveyor system helped them sort orders up to the capacity of 800 orders per day for 13 years. distribution facility to scale their operations and installed a conveyor system to handle their expected volumes at that time. In 2007, Waytek had moved into its present 100,000-sq.-ft. The Chanhassen, Minn.-based company said its mission is to make it easy for for its customers to source electrical parts. The company faced fulfillment growing pains before it implemented a flexible system using autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs.įounded in 1970, Waytek is a family-owned distributor of electrical components to manufacturers and upfitters specializing in wire harnesses and mobile equipment. This was the case for Waytek, a distributor of automotive electrical components. Growth is good for businesses, though it can strain the limits of existing manual and automated processes in distribution centers.
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