Customer Overview
As a top retail player in the continent, this company operates a vast network of stores. With multiple distribution centers and millions of products moving through its supply chain daily, efficiency in logistics is critical. As most retailers, a high volume of goods move floor-loaded, both as import inputs as well as across the supply chain including e-commerce orders.
Therefore optimizing unloading costs, reducing labor dependency and making unloading operations safe is a top priority for this player.

The Challenge

Being a high-volume retailer, the company faces massive logistical challenges in unloading floor-loaded trailers. The key pain points include:
– Labor Shortages & Rising Costs: Increasing wages and labour shortage was making finding unloading operators increasingly challenging and expensive. The physically demanding nature of truck unloading further exacerbates this challenge.
– Poor ROI on Existing Robotic Solutions: Given existing solutions focus on handling boxes individually or as small multiples, achieving productivity which justifies the cost of the solution becomes challenging. Furthermore, the low throughput creates bottlenecks at the dock during peak season.
– Inability of Existing Solution to Handle Variability: When trucks are packed in a semi-structured or unstructured manner, existing robotic solutions fail as they either can’t handle the lack of structure, or even if they can, deliver drastically low throughput. Furthermore, these solutions are not able to handle the variability across different goods’ categories that are typical to retailers.

Given these limitations, no existing robotic system was able to fulfil the customer’s requirement. The company needed a high-productivity solution that could handle variability and provide a strong return on investment (ROI).

The Solution

Rightbot’s Wolverine was able to offer the customer exactly what it was looking for – a solution delivering a strong ROI, high throughput and able to handle the variability inherent in retail.
The customer used Wolverine to unload trailers with apparel and fashion goods at one of its distribution centers. Key highlights included:

– Consistently delivered >5x the productivity vs manual unloading as well as that of other robotic unloading solutions.

– Unloaded trailers with a high number of different SKUs as seamlessly as those with a lower number of SKUs

– Even for trailers where stacking was not well structured, there was no impact in unloading efficiency or effectiveness

Results & Impact

– Unloaded a 53-ft trailer filled with tires in <1 hour, thereby reducing the unloading time by more than 75%
– Unlike manual unloading, where productivity drops progressively due to fatigue, Wolverine achieved consistent throughput across the shifts without any slowdown.

Conclusion

Rightbot’s Wolverine convincingly demonstrated that manual trailer unloading inefficiencies can be eliminated entirely through automation. With its ability to handle any type of stacking and goods at record-breaking speeds, Wolverine provides an unparalleled solution for retailers looking to optimize their supply chain operations.

If you are looking for ways to significantly reduce your operational expenses caused by manual trailer unloading, we have the perfect solution for you. Contact us now to learn more!