Winning the race, Fleet Feet implements autonomous mobile robots

Fleet Feet is the largest franchisor of special retailers’ shops focusing on providing high quality services for runners, walkers and gymnastics all skills. To improve their activities, they installed autonomous mobile robots in their warehouse.

According to one overview Of the 250 world companies from McKinsey Counseling, 91% of loaders and 75% of logistics service providers have implemented a warehouse management system. On the contrary, autonomous mobile robots have been applied Less than 8% of our warehouses.

When new industrial technology appears, they are large companies that apply them first. There is a delay before the smaller companies begin to apply technology. Fleet Feet is a smaller company. They manage a 75,000 -square -foot distribution center. AMRs are much more frequently applied to warehouses over 250,000 square feet.

Further, where large warehouses can employ hundreds of collectors, fleet legs had less than 20. Can a warehouse with so few collectors get good repayment from AMRS?

The fleet’s legs chain

The goal for retailer Carrboro, North Carolina, is to make every store a hub for the local community it serves. Storage partners are expected to be active in the local community they serve. The company also uses technology to provide high quality services to its customers.

The process of equipment of the fleet legs begins when a customer walks to the door. Customer explains what they want to do – whether it competes in a marathon, a fun course in their community, or just walks with friends in their neighborhood – and then a store representative (what they call “outfitters”) gets 3D measurements From the client’s feet and watches them walking using dynamic pressure mapping technology. Outfitters, along with data -based information, allow customers to find their best footwear.

At the end of 2021, Fleet Feet acquired Jackrabbit-a competitor with 55 brick and mortar shops in 15 states. This has more than doubled the number of stores belonging to the company. Fleet legs also won Jackrabbit’s e -commerce operation in the acquisition.

The distribution center is crucial for the flow of the Fleet Feet product in the 80-plus stores. Most of the goods intended for shops belonging to the company flow through their distribution center in Durham, North Carolina. The warehouse also supports their e -commerce business. DC has 36 employees and operates seven days a week. Incoming missions include Parcel, less than the truck and truck. Outgoing missions – shipments to stores – are parcel.

Anthony Pendola, senior director of distribution in Fleet Feet, said Jackrabbit acquisition “made us take a harsh look at the system and supply chain processes.” After this acquisition, the company acknowledged that they faced challenges by keeping the stores in stock. “At the distribution center, we tried to add staff and lengthen the working day to meet these challenges. But these things proved to be superficial corrections. We recognized that we needed a solution that would help us increase our performance, but that would also be Scale as we continued to add more and more stores.

Fleet Feet aims to have 400 stores in the next five years. The company opened 10 stores in 2024 and expects to exceed this number in 2025.

The Locus Robotics Application

The company went live with autonomous mobile robots from Locus robotics October 2023. The company had no automation in its distribution work before it.

Unfortunately, the implementation of the robotics warehouse was part of a much larger project. Due to growth, it was clear that they did not have enough storage. They approved three warehouses – one of which took the acquisition – at Durham DC. The building and the opening of this distribution center took a year and a half. They moved to the distribution center in August 2023 and went live with the warehouse robots in October.

In the meantime, growth has also served as a boost for the company to replace its basic business system. They moved from QuickBooks to Netsuite. The warehouse management system they used was not compatible with Netsuite. This led to the need to apply a new WMS that was. Chose a solution from Körber Supply Chain Software; The Körber Edge solution.

In addition to being a WMS supplier, Körber works with Locus. Körber is a leading integration system of autonomous mobile robots. Having Körber implement both WMS and AMRS, fleet legs thought they could incorporate AMRs into operation earlier than expected.

There were challenges

There was skepticism that the AMRS was the right solution. Mr Pendola admitted that he was one of the skeptics. “I would sit through the demos and I would like to think, how these bots will handle large orders we usually send our stores? An order can have 100 pairs of shoes, 300 pairs of socks, and then another 150 mixed items. This The bot with a container in it, how will it host all this?

But the place has finally turned out to be very flexible. Could handle both large store orders and an item’s options for an e -commerce order. “I learned the importance of being an open mind.” The whole choice is now done with just five order selections working with 22 bots.

The fact that multiple systems were implemented at the same time at the same time meant that the company did not have enough time to prepare for WMS and AMR implementations.
“We got a rip approach for the band,” Mr. Pendola admitted reluctantly. “There were many unknown ones that we were just unprepared.”

An example, the warehouse uses a box that is manufactured, which generally holds 12 pairs of shoes. The box lies snuggly on the robot platform when it gets up by its side. Shoes take in this box. When the box is filled, it goes to a package station to ship. Because the shoes are full in the shipping box, no reflection is required. One of the problems they encountered was that the boxes had fins on them. Sometimes, when the robots passed each other in the hallway, the fins from each box would be caught on each other and the boxes would fall to the floor. Then the partners will have to reassess the boxes, but they will not know which pairs of shoes went to which box. This would get the business to stop.

And then someone had the “Great Idea”, Mr. Pendola explained, to take a bungee cable and secure the fins, wrapping it around the robot. “We still use these yellow bungee cables today.” $ 5 Bunge Cords Corrected the problem.

The other challenge is that in order to effectively fill the custom boxes, precise weights and dimensions for their products were essential. If an order contained some sizes 14 triple eees, 12 pairs of shoes will not fit the box. If there were many small women’s shoes, more than 12 will match. When the warehouse ran by hand, this was not important. But for the new process, it was critical.

The Fleet Feet has over 200 chips and over 10,000 stock conservation units. For a large wave of work associated with an order, there may be 500 items, both shoes and clothes, that they had to fit into Tote. At the end of the wave, instead of having 500 objects, due to poor dimensioning, there may be only 200. “What about the other 300?” Mr. Pendola exclaimed. “Where will they go? This created a really big problem. “This problem was resolved by taking the correct dimensions from their suppliers and importing this information into their business system. But receiving this information took time.

Fleet legs received significant benefits

Fleet legs received many benefits from the application:

• Increased Effectiveness of Selection – The choice increased from 85 points per hour to 180 points per hour. Some partners have an average of more than 250 points per hour.
• Improved stock accuracy in warehouse – Due to increases in efficiency, workers were released for new duties. Selection personnel were reduced from nearly 20 to 9. Fleet Feet has created a stock coordinator that focuses exclusively on stock accuracy. The accuracy of the DC stock now exceeds 99.5%. The best inventory accuracy also improves supplies.
• Improved worker on board – Previously, it will take 8 to 10 hours to make comfortable new employees using the scanner device to receive selection instructions. Now, workers can be trained in 15 to 20 minutes.
• Future warehouse protection – AMRS is a gradual technology. If the performance needs to be increased, it is easy to add new bots. Their contract with Körber’s Robot-as a Service supports this conventionally.
• Improved ergonomics – Employees do not need to walk so much on the basis of the logic of optimization and the fact that the bots make the trip to the shipping stations rather than the collectors. Selection work is now less painful. There is also no need for a second shift anymore. Because of this, most collectors prefer to work with the bots.
• Support for non -natural speakers – Employees have an identity. When an employee approaches a bot, the bot is connected to the ID. The bot pulls the employee’s profile and knows his preferred language. Then there are work instructions in this language.

But the biggest benefit of the project was to improve customer service! The best customer service is what will lead to growth for fleet feet. Before implementation, the warehouse sent a mission to each store owned by the company per week. Now, they are developing stores more often. The retailer’s order cycle – the period from the period when an order will enter the queue until it is sent – has been reduced by three and a half days to half a day. Thus, stores are now more likely to be in stock when a customer walks through the door.

Mr. Pendola summarized it by saying: “True success does not come from cutting costs or compression of margins. It comes from growth, sustainable deliberate growth. So we build long -term value.”