Danger, American Eagle
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
Wired has a good article and video on Zappo‘s new inventory management system, which is completely automated by networked Roomba-robots from Kiva Systems. This seems to be the future for modern mail-order retail as errors, theft, and accidents are reduced to nearly zero. It’s even self-sorting! Certainly a cool system for industrial organization geeks.
I just wish the popular online t-shirt company (which rhymes with Bread-mess) I worked at this summer had a similar system. Their warehouse work-flow went as follows (all done manually):
- Receive pallets at warehouse 1
- Disassemble pallets into boxes
- Open boxes to check style and size.
- Reseal boxes
- Sort boxes by style and size
- Move boxes one block away to warehouse 2 by van
- Resort boxes by style and size again
- Place boxes on the shelves
- Remove boxes from shelves
- Open boxes and put shirts on shelves
- GOTO 1
All the robots in the world couldn’t help this system, which tended to collapse under heavy workloads.
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Update 01/29: Here’s the video
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