We all saw the shift from shopping in-store to online during the pandemic. And although e-commerce sales grew 14.2% in 2021, this growth is more on par with pre-pandemic levels as consumers are returning to in-store shopping. Omnichannel retailers must find a balance to support both in-store and online customers as shopping habits continue to change in 2022.

To be prepared for peak this year, it’s time to evaluate processes, from hiring seasonal labor to managing accurate inventory, in order to prepare for periodic spikes in fulfillment.

Flex labor to meet demand

Retailers need to add seasonal labor more often than the one time holiday sprint. This can be extremely difficult because not only is labor already scarce, but reliable labor is even harder to come by. Finding and hiring labor outside of “traditional peak” can be even more challenging. According to a recent survey by Modern Materials Handling, 60% of respondents said there were “too few candidates to interview”. This begs the question, how do you fulfill more orders with less labor?

To increase productivity and meet peak demand, operations should consider automating the picking (and replenishment) process. Speeding up fulfillment provides a competitive advantage, and enables your business to meet service level agreements (SLAs) such as same or next day delivery.

There are several technologies on the market, so when labor is hard to come by, make your existing labor force more efficient with tools that will enhance their job performance. For example, implementing barcode scanning to confirm picks will increase order accuracy. In addition, autonomous mobile robots can help attract, train and retain employees. By directing an associate directly to a pick location, the risk of human error is reduced and productivity increases, which means more orders going out the door.

Stay ahead with “just in case” inventory

Keeping inventory organized will help ensure more accurate inventory counts. With supply chain disruptions unexpectedly interfering with inventory availability, stocking additional Just In Case (JIC) inventory might be the way to go this season. Another consideration though is end of season turnover. After each season, sporting goods stores must liquidate or deeply discount products to free up storage space. To reduce the financial impact this has on an operation, be sure to look at historical data to find the sweet spot. The right amount of inventory on hand will help you avoid “out of stock” messages and can provide a competitive advantage against those less prepared.

Timing is everything. Another way to stay ahead is to consider fulfilling orders directly from stores to end users. Connectivity throughout all store locations and fulfillment warehouses will provide inventory information across your entire operation. This reduces stock outs and ultimately improves customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal

To keep customers coming back for more, retailers will need to provide excellent customer service in 2022. Therefore, getting orders out the door quickly and accurately is a necessity to earn repeat business. Additionally, meeting or exceeding delivery expectations and offering alternatives for pick-up such as curb side and buy online pick up in store (BOPIS) can attract new customers.

As order volume increases, so do returns. Operations need a solution to ramp up both order fulfillment and replenishment to keep up. Automation will not only benefit your business in the off season, but it will enable you to scale up quickly to manage the influx of customer orders and potential returns as well. Technology offers flexibility and scalability to meet the changing needs of your business. Using technology and labor together, will enable you to pick and putaway faster than labor alone.

Partnering with a warehouse fulfillment solution provider allows you to design your picking strategy to be flexible and scalable when you need it. Deploying autonomous mobile robots, increase efficiencies in your entire warehouse, starting with your labor force. Moving from picking to packing to putaway, AMRs can lead the way to faster fulfillment. Get ready for peak fulfillment with 6 River Systems!

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For sellers, that means time is of the essence. The longer it takes to get a product back onto warehouse shelves, the larger the discount required to re-sell that item, especially in fashion categories with less than 90-day cycles. So, getting returns back into active, available inventory is critical to loss mitigation.

With that, not everyone approaches returns the same way. Restocking strategies are often designed to meet one of two scenarios: optimize for speed or the maximum residual value of the product.

1. Optimize for speed and/or space
   In focusing on speed and/or capacity, operations – especially smaller operations with low price point products– choose to liquidate or dispose of returns to eliminate restocking, processing costs and facility congestion. The operation may know it’s leaving money on the table but lacks the resources to improve the returns process.
2. Optimize for maximum residual value of the product
   When focusing on maximum residual value, the challenge is allocating facility costs and operations time to inspect and disposition. In this scenario, the extreme bias is to disposition everything to maximize value.

No matter what restocking strategy you choose, after sorting returns many operations rely on manual processes for putaway. Products are stored in cages until they fill up. Then, associates load up carts and push them through the warehouse to put product back on the shelves. Processing returns this way can be an inefficient use of valuable warehouse space, a suboptimal use of associates, and an enormous cost.

So, with a flood of products headed back to warehouses and a race against the clock to restock, how can operations improve their returns process?

6 River Systems and our collaborative mobile robot, Chuck helps to make the returns process less strenuous and time consuming. 

Returns are staged in totes (different products can be in the same tote) ready to be placed on Chuck. Then, the associate meets up with Chuck, scans their badge, and follows as Chuck optimally directs them to the first task – replacing cumbersome push carts and improving worker safety. Ensure putaway accuracy through scanning as well as confirmation and exception information sent to the WMS.

With 6 River Systems’ returns putaway, sellers can get product back on the shelf more quickly, more profitably and keep their fulfillment operation running smoothly.

> Learn more about how 6 River Systems can help streamline returns

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Amazon, Target and Best Buy all rolled out Black Friday deals in October. Shopping early for holiday deals was so important this year that 59% of retailers planned to start their holiday season marketing in October or before according to a Digital Commerce 360 report. Some big retailers such as Macy’s and The Gap took it a step further and sent Black Friday campaigns in July. 

An associate picks with Chuck, 6 River Systems’ collaborative robot.

Across the 6 River Systems customer network we see that the early promotional activity was effective. Holiday shopping at our customer sites started earlier in 2021 than it did in 2020. Our customers doubled their order volume from the beginning of November to Thanksgiving. The earlier start to the shopping season also meant the Black Friday to Cyber Monday surge in our network was not as high as we’ve seen in previous years.

Labor challenges were top of mind coming into peak 2021. One of the biggest retailers in the world replaced their voice pick solution with 6 River Systems so they could use robots to attract new associates and train them faster. With their new 6 River Systems solution this retailer’s warehouse operation was able to double their throughput and meet service level agreements.  

A third party logistics customer, Quiet 3PF, highlighted their 6 River Systems solution because automation was key to allowing them to scale and process 58% more units and reduce time to ship by 45%. 

So, how are 6 River Systems customers meeting Service Level Agreements, responding to changes in growth and peak season timing, all the while delivering a world class customer experience?

They use 6 River Systems’ solution to address peak challenges: 

System Directed Picking Workflows – 6 River Systems’ System Directed picking increases operational efficiencies by aggregating available tasks and creating optimized workflows to direct and pace associates.

Configurability – Chuck, 6 River Systems’ collaborative robot carries a broad range of SKUs or container types and deploys the optimal picking strategy for your operation.

Wall-to-Wall Fulfillment – Our fulfillment solutions go beyond picking to address throughput in the entire warehouse or distribution center and include sortation, packout, replenishment and putaway.

Peak 2021 is showing us that operations must be flexible and efficient to take on whatever comes their way whether it be an extended peak season or a return to Black Friday volume of previous years. 

Discover how 6 River Systems helps customers solve three common peak fulfillment challenges:

The post Peak 2021 Fulfillment Demand Grows, 6 River Systems Leads the Way appeared first on 6 River Systems.

How does 6RS Improve Training Time?

6 River Systems’ solution uses a system-directed workflow which self-trains an associate as they complete their picking, replenishment, or various other tasks in the warehouse. Our collaborative robot “Chuck” will guide associates to locations following a pre-planned path that can change dynamically, so they don’t have to know where products are stored or the fastest way to get there. Once at the location, Chuck offers simple and clear instructions on how to perform their picking work. Associates don’t need to learn complex WMS RF terminal sequences or, worse, fuss around with a piece of paper to record the activity later. Additionally, with Chuck’s built in scanner, use of product images and put-to-light system, it has a significant reduction on mispicks and other errors.

Related: See how Legend Valve relies on automation to free up their associates’ time to provide an industry-leading customer experience.

How much do we save in training a new employee?

Let’s analyze a typical new-hire scenario for a site using traditional pick carts versus a site using Chucks.

Typically, it takes 4-5 days to train an associate at a cart pick operation. However, they won’t hit expected productivity, or standard rates, for 4-6 weeks. For this comparison, we are assuming that they are 80% of standard rate in four weeks. However, the associate doesn’t magically start producing at one point; their productivity follows an increasing curve within that time period then slowly levels off as they reach full productivity rates (shown in red).

By contrast, our data shows us that Chucks help an associate up to that 80% of standard rate on day one and then to full productivity in the following few days (shown in blue). Assuming 80 Units Per Hour (UPH) for a cart pick operation, the difference between a fully trained associate and the first six weeks of a new hire would amount to about 7000 units over the six weeks shown.

In terms of labor, these 7000 units represent 87 hours or about 12 days of associate work. Assuming a cost of $13/hr, this is well over $1,100 of unproductive labor for each newly hired employee. By contrast, Chuck, performing at 160 UPH, would only have 320 fewer picks, resulting in the equivalent of 2 lost hours or $26 of unproductive labor.

Related: See why everyone at MD Logistics Loves Chuck.

Fewer interruptions for your best employees

Another benefit of Chuck is that it enables an associate to self-train. When a new associate joins the team, there is often significant time spent by floor managers or sometimes your best associates to train up the newcomer. This means that not only are the new employees not producing a high output, they are slowing down some of your most important people. Usually a senior employee spends 2-3 hours for the first 4-5 days of training, and another half hour per day for the following four weeks. This ends up being about 23 hours of the floor manager’s time and at $15/hr would be an additional ~$350 of training costs. By comparison, with less than 15 minutes of training, the associates can be up and running with Chuck, allowing these valuable employees to focus on other fulfillment tasks and exception handling.

The impact of training during seasonal peaks

Rapid training has an even bigger impact on seasonal and other temporary labor. Let’s compare a seasonal associate with an expected productivity rate of 80 UPH (illustrated above with the green line) using a manual cart with a seasonal associate using Chuck. Assuming a typical 100% rate gain, the Chuck-enhanced associate (illustrated in blue) will reach full productivity at 160 UPH. As illustrated in the graph above, although the associate using carts to pick (the red line) is at their full UPH at the end of peak, their average rate over the entire period is only 57 UPH due to their slow ramp-up. The associate using Chuck, however, hits their stride very quickly and averages 152 UPH. In our last scenario, Chuck provided a 100% gain to your long term workforce. For seasonal workers, it provides a much greater gain: 166%!

Related: Learn how Ingram Micro prepared for a 10x increase in volume last holiday season.

The other option is to hire seasonal associates several weeks prior to peak to allow them adequate time to train. Let’s do a comparison assuming a typical 40 day peak schedule and a 20-day ramp-up time. In this scenario, you will pay labor for an extra 50% more time to train before peak. Even with this pre-training period, the average picking rate over 60 days would be 64 UPH, still giving Chucks a 138% rate advantage for these temporary workers.

Add more flexibility in your business

Possibly more important than cost savings is flexibility in your operation. The rapid training possibilities 6 River Systems provides allows for a much more agile business. For example, during the current COVID-19 crisis, many of our customers have seen unanticipated peaks as the demand on ecommerce spiked. They were able to rapidly add additional Chucks and temporary labor to adjust for this demand, far more quickly than otherwise possible. And in some cases, they picked up and moved Chucks across their different facilities to support regional spikes in volume. Temporary and portable capacity is something that no traditional automation can offer.

Related: See how keeping their automation solution flexible allowed DM Fulfillment Services to thrive in uncertain times.

Final Thoughts

Increasing productivity through rate gains is one of the largest benefits of 6 River Systems’ solution. It is important to realize that there are other factors that have significant monetary and non-monetary benefits. The advantages of a system directed approach using mobile collaborative robots that assists associates in the warehouse has a huge impact on training times. This not only translates directly into the bottom line, but also allows your business to be more nimble and adjust quickly to the rapidly changing world.

The post Why training time matters more than you think appeared first on 6 River Systems.

Let’s get some vocabulary out of the way. What is a peak-to-mean ratio?

Warehouses anticipate order volumes based on what they experience from one day to the next. This average workflow is referred to as the mean. When orders fluctuate to volumes higher than that average, it is called a peak. To calculate the peak-to-mean ratio, divide the peak volume number by the mean volume number.

Prepping for extreme peak demand volumes

Product designers and engineers at 6RS have been preparing for months to ensure that our robots, our cloud-based software and our site’s operations are ready. “During peak, our customers process many thousands of orders in a single wave.” explains Joe Hughes, Director of Software at 6RS. “We’ve been simulating peak activity at each of our sites to work out any issues before our customers experience them.”

What does a solution in an operation experiencing 5x their average volume look like?

Solutions built to flex to high peak ratios require a balance between flexibility, intelligence, and brute force. One F100 company prepared for extreme fluctuations by overhauling their fulfillment processes from induct to pack out with 6 River Systems. They increased picking efficiency by consolidating high-frequency orders into singles batches, utilized sort walls to singulate them, implemented 6RS packout stations, and integrated an autobagger into the process. To top if off, they rented additional Chucks to double the size of their fleet.

At 6 River Systems, We Win When Our Customers Win

For us, customer success is the measure of all of our efforts. When we see a site that can deliver on a 5x peak demand, we know that we are on the right track.

Read more of our customer stories.

The post Peak Stories: F100 Fulfillment Center Fulfills 5X Daily Average Volume During Cyber Week appeared first on 6 River Systems.

For many shoppers, the holiday season excitement begins today — Black Friday.

For distribution center operators, the season brings the challenge of meeting peak volume and service demands.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) forecasts that consumers will spend upwards of $731 billion this holiday shopping season, including $167 billion (23%) on e-commerce purchases.

Leave the excitement to the shoppers

6 River Systems (6RS) strives to help its customers make holiday peak a non-event through strategic planning and predictable fulfillment performance and throughput.

For operations with significant peak impacts, the collaborative planning process begins in the summer. That’s when 6RS’ solution design, customer support, hardware, and reliability teams begin conversations with customer operations leaders.

Typically, the facility GM, fulfillment leader and project leader participate in the meetings. The customers share their volume projections, potential operation impacts, obstacles, and peak objectives. Some facilities even mimic peak conditions by delaying order picking to create volume spikes. The insights gained through these efforts help operators to determine what changes may be needed to handle the increased volumes.

Labor impacts

6RS works closely with customer operations teams to understand their labor plans. This includes calculating the number of additional collaborative mobile robots, Chucks, that are required within the facility to support peak.

In facilities requiring additional Chucks, our team ensures that the new robots can work smoothly within the warehouse footprint and drive throughput. When that analysis is complete, the additional Chucks are built, delivered, and then deployed.

Process impacts

While most operators are concerned about picking activities, the pre-peak collaboration also revealed several other process challenges. Most notably, solutions designers found “breaking points” in replenishment, order packout, and other functional areas.

This review allowed 6RS to identify and resolve potential peak process issues in a controlled environment, making sure that the operations are prepared for — not surprised by — peak.

Peak tune-up and execution

In addition to strategic planning and stress tests, 6RS completed preventive hardware maintenance inspections and repairs at all sites expecting significant peak impact. During peak, 6RS will work with the facility leaders to address any unforeseen volume increases, fulfillment-related issues, or requirements changes.

This holiday season, 6RS plans to leave the excitement and surprises to the shoppers.

The post Keep the excitement of the holidays in the right place: with the consumers. appeared first on 6 River Systems.

For most operations, this short-lived volume increase makes it both inefficient and costly to make any major infrastructure transformations within the warehouse. Historically, warehouse operators have relied primarily on seasonal labor to increase throughput to meet peak demand. However, due to record low unemployment rates in recent years, this approach is no longer feasible. 

In September 2018, unemployment rates in the US dropped to 3.7%. This marked the lowest rate in the US since 1969, and it has remained in the 3.6% to 4% range through October of 2019. This labor shortage caused 20% of warehouse jobs to go unfulfilled in 2018, and similar outcomes are forecast for this peak season. Even after operators increased wages in an effort to attract employees, the available supply remained so limited that this gap could not be bridged.

To further exacerbate this dilemma, customer expectations around delivery time have drastically increased. With Amazon as the number one online retailer offering free one-day shipping–and, most recently, two-hour shipping–consumers expect their packages to arrive immediately and free of charge. 

This shift in expectations has caused the bar for fulfillment to be higher than ever before. If retail and ecommerce warehouses are unable to keep up with Amazon’s standards, especially during peak, they risk losing market share to those who do. 

The case for collaborative robots:
Scalability, quick implementation, labor shortage

Collaborative robots, or “cobots,” are the new way warehouses fulfill. Their flexible and adaptive capacity allow them to increase both productivity and order selection accuracy in warehouse operations. These benefits are especially critical during volume peaks, as the ongoing labor shortage prevents operations from being able to rely on seasonal labor to bridge the gap. 

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that cobots are on the rise. ABI Research projects the current number of robotic warehouses to grow by more than 12x by 2025, at which point there will be 4 million commercial robots in over 50,000 warehouses. 

Below are some of the key flexibility factors throughout the entire life cycle that make cobots so compelling:

How to achieve peak productivity:
Consider experience, solution breadth, fast ROI

While there are several different collaborative robotics systems to choose from, 6 River Systems’ (6RS) solution is uniquely differentiated from its competitors.

• Team: The founders are former Kiva executives, and possess unmatched experience and success in designing and implementing successful warehouse robotics systems. The team has installed more collaborative robotics systems than any other company.
• Product Line: With fully automated picking, sorting, and packout products launched in 2019, 6RS has extended its capabilities to an end-to-end fulfillment solution. The system, based on a patented worker directed approach, integrates with a wide variety of material handling and software systems.
• Ongoing Value: Chucks gain core product functionality in addition to new features every year. Chuck was initially released as a cobot for discrete order picking. Just 2½ years later, the same Chuck also can batch pick, replenish, be used in automated picking, and charge automatically when its battery is low. The capabilities will expand even further by next peak season. 
• Analytics: Embedded dashboards provide operational insights on associate performance and hours worked by task type. Operators leverage this data to identify potential problem areas and for labor planning.
• Customer Success Focus: After implementation, 6RS assigns a multi-disciplinary, dedicated team with a single point of contact to ensure success. 6RS has committed to raising the average performance rate of its customer sites over the course of 2020. 
• Return on Investment: 6RS increases productivity by 2-3x and is installed in weeks, making the return on investment extremely compelling.

6 River Systems customer success stories

	“We think we’ve found a really great partner in 6 River and a really great technology on Chuck. We look forward to building upon that and taking off from here as we continue to improve our operations.” – Bob Abbondanza, Senior Director Supply Chain Engineering and Network Design
	“In peak season, we will have a greater capacity and be able to pick more with less labor by using 6 River Systems.” – Ryan Robertson, Director of Operations, Retail Logistics
	“We hit a return on investment with 6 River Systems in about 4 months. We wanted to streamline the process and remove as many steps as possible. With 6 River Systems, pickers stay in aisle the entire time and the amount of units they’re processing per hour has tripled.” – Ryan Cox, Industrial Engineer

For more information, review success stories from several 6RS customers, including ACT Fulfillment Center, NFI, Healing Hands, and Office Depot. We can also discuss the solution that’s right for you. Contact us today.

About the Author

Callie Moriarty is one of 6 River Systems’ first Customer Success Managers. She is responsible for the optimization, success, and overall customer satisfaction at ten live 6RS customer sites. After being a part of 6RS’ holiday peak season in 2018, she wanted to share the overwhelming value of collaborative robotics with her current and future customers.

The post Are you prepared to meet peak season fulfillment challenges? appeared first on 6 River Systems.