So, why ‘6 River Systems’?

6 River Systems is named after the Charles River, which is a six-river system. For those who haven’t been to Boston, the Charles River flows right through the center of the city. We think this is an awesome place to start a company. Many of us grew up here and love living in New England.

And what’s the other meaning about?

The 6 River Systems solution eliminates non-value added walking, creates in-aisle efficiencies and intelligently groups tasks. All of these benefit pickers, the primary users of 6 River Systems. So naturally, the second meaning behind our name has to do with how Chuck, our collaborative mobile robot, helps with picking.

There are seven steps to picking in a warehouse and six our collaborative mobile robot solution makes faster — hence, the ‘6’ in 6 River Systems.

Here are the steps:

1. Long walk. Chucks keep pickers busy in the active pick area, eliminating long walks to packout or to pick up a new cart.
2. Find bin. Chucks help pickers find the bin that contains the right item. The robot leads pickers on an optimized pick path, and parks right in front of the correct bin.
3. Find the product. Chucks come with a tablet-sized screen that displays the pick item, saving pickers time idenifying the correct product.
4. Grab item. Chucks do not help with this step. Chuck is a collaborative robot that helps pickers improve their job. The robot does not replace them.
5. Confirm the product. Chucks have scanners that let pickers confirm a pick hands-free.
6. Put item away. Lights on Chuck’s trays illuminate to highlight which tote to place products into, ensuring pickers are always assembling the right orders.
7. Transition. When pickers complete a task on Chuck, the robot uses smart work grouping to seamlessly move them onto another task.

Want to learn more about Chuck and 6 River Systems? Check out our Solutions page, or call us at 1-800-60-CHUCK.

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Don’t have time to watch the video? Here are the cliff notes:

What is an order? And what happens when you go online to place an order?

Let’s start with a fictional e-commerce order. Say you buy one marker, one shirt and three rubber ducks online. You click the shopping cart, enter your billing details and tap purchase. This is how a set of goods become an order in a warehouse’s fulfillment system.

If this seems overly simplistic — hold on. This order is actually broken down into three different components warehouses commonly refer to: order, lines and units.

Order: The “shopping basket” full of items you’ve just purchased.
Lines: The different products within your order, recognized by warehouses as each individual Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) or Universal Product Code (UPC) number.
Units: The quantity of each line.

So, your e-commerce order above can be broken down into:

• 1 order
• 3 lines
• 5 units

What does the full process, from manufacturing to the product arriving at my doorstep, look like?

You’ve placed an order, and someone in a warehouse will eventually pick, pack and ship it to your doorstep. But how does the product get to the warehouse in the first place?

Assuming it’s already been manufactured, products are shipped to a fulfillment or distribution center. Products arrive to the warehouse in pallets, which are broken down into cases, and moved into an active pick area, ready to be picked into orders.

How does my order get picked?

There are a few different ways to pick orders in warehouse, but in this video we cover two methods:

Discrete picking: When pickers take each individual order and pick it into a box, which is then directly shipped to the consumer. So, one person picks your rubber ducks, marker and shirt into a container that will eventually end up on your doorstep.

Batch picking: Batch picking is when you group a bunch of orders into one tote. One person picks 100 people’s rubber ducks in one shot, and then someone else sorts that batch into your individual order.

This is where the 6 River Systems solution helps, by making picking faster and better through our collaborative mobile robot Chuck. 6 River Systems and Chuck support both types of picking, even at the same time.

What is UPH?

UPH stands for units per hour. It means just that — how many units are picked in an hour. While warehouses may use other metrics, like Lines Per Hour (LPH), most warehouses use UPH as their base throughput metric to measure efficiency.

For more resources related to the warehousing process and warehouse terms, check out:

• The ultimate guide to warehouse order picking
• Types of automated storage and retrieval systems 
• 50 expert warehouse management best practices

The post Basic warehouse terms and workflows, explained appeared first on 6 River Systems.

Jerome Dubois is the co-CEO and co-founder of 6 River Systems.

I’ve been selling robotics automation solutions to warehouses for years. One question I get a lot about our robot Chuck is “Does it get rid of the walking?” It’s a valid question. But it’s based on a popular misconception about warehouse efficiency: to increase productivity you need to get rid of all the walking.

Operators demonize walking because, let’s face it, most walking in warehouses is inefficient. Associates spend precious hours pushing manual carts, searching for the right aisles and rummaging for the correct SKUs instead of actually picking inventory. Logistics VPs get so frustrated about their slow pick rates and low throughput that they turn to warehouse automation solutions, like conveyor-based pick modules, pick-to-light and goods-to-person technologies. These vendors tell operators that caged off and anchored down steel and motors is the only way to fix their walking problems.

That’s fine, if you’ve got millions to spend, a timeline of 9-24 months and years to wait for a return on investment. We’ve got a better way around this problem: one where you can keep money in the bank, increase the productivity of your existing workforce and match the throughput of traditional automation solutions.

An alternative exists to provide you 80% of the benefit of the goods-to-person systems at 20% of the cost.

So, what’s the catch?

We use walks to do much more.

Goods-to-person automation — technologies that bring inventory directly to associates — nearly eliminate walking for each pick. But there are all sorts of tasks in the warehouse, not just picks. With 6RS and Chuck, we optimize walking through work allocation to help associates accomplish more tasks in the same amount of walking.

Lost? Let me explain with some numbers and a few different types of pick strategies. Let’s say the average cart pick takes 40 seconds. Of that, associates typically spend 30 seconds walking and searching for inventory. They only spend about 10 seconds actually picking items. The throughput in this scenario is 90 UPH.

With conveyors, you eliminate the long walk. Now you’re down to 20 seconds for each pick and your UPH goes up to 180. This is great. But what you’ve done now is introduced a costly infrastructure into your warehouse, making your whole business more inflexible. You’ve designed and purchased equipment for five years out, so you’re effectively locked in.  

With goods-to-person automation, you get rid of all the long walks, so your throughput shoots up to 300 UPH. It sounds great on paper. But you don’t completely eliminate walking, because operators are still taking steps in their stations to grab and pack products. You might have a stellar UPH, but you’ve also got a tremendous amount of expensive and inflexible infrastructure to maintain. What if your product mix or your order profile changes?

At 6 River we’ve developed a system that eliminates the long walks, reduces the steps in the aisle and speeds up the operator. Using cloud-based servers and AI, we group similar work together, making the path as dense as possible and reducing steps in between every task. 6RS taps into your Warehouse Management System to combine picking, replenishment and other tasks onto a single Chuck. To help do the work faster, we use images and lights to make it very easy for pickers to identify products. All this while pacing and directing the operator through their work with Chuck. Operators never have to push or pull a manual cart or fumble with an RF scanner.

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