Paul Clarke, Ocado's chief technology officer, has said he envisions the company eventually moving to completely "dark" fulfillment centers—ones that would be fully automated and employ virtually no people.
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WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation
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Farid Mheir
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Social distancing requires rethinking the layout of workplaces. A new breed of robots can help keep factories and warehouses running.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: I've seen these robots at CES2020 (or was it NRF?) and they are quite impressive. The video in the article shows that having small robots work alongside humans is a reality today. You'll see in the video that they use a modified kinect camera to sense depth, devices that I've also seen at CES this year and years before. Applications are endless and relatively low cost. 
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A leading Canadian grocer will pilot automated fulfillment of its buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) offering. Loblaw Inc. is building an automated picking facility to support its PC Express BOPIS service. Leveraging a hyperlocal fulfillment solution from Takeoff Technologies that functions in compact vertical spaces, Loblaw will launch the 12,000-sq.-ft. facility inside one of its GTA Real Canadian superstores in 2020.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: order fulfillment and delivery is the last remaining hurdle to eCommerce. Loblaws in Canada will pilot a micro-fulfillment solution from TakeOff that impressed me last year at Shoptalk. In short, they create an automated back-store where eCommerce orders are prepared with a huge amount of automation. The question remains whether the economics is better for micro-fulfillment or if centralized warehouse fulfillment with hub-and-spoke delivery is better suited for high volume / low margin eCommerce that grocery is about. Thus this "test" by Loblaws. Note that Sobeys has decided in favor of more centralized ocado-driven automated warehouse and Metro remains with the more traditional decentralized (and manual) store-based pick-pack-deliver process. Given the low volume of orders for online grocery in Canada I remain partisan of a store-based manual approach but the economics I got from TakeOff was promising. Below additional links if you want to read more about takeoff and ocado.
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Boston Dynamics only has 20 of the robots available right now, but it’s hoping to manufacture about 1,000 for use out in the field. So it has to be very choosy about who gets one. It hasn’t disclosed how much they will cost.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this is a big deal because the Boston Dynamics robots appear to be the advanced and versatile. The fact that they are made commercially available is significant after years of being research project. You have to be in the market for an early device with lots of limitations but, looking down the road a few years, one has to start planning for robots to start making their way into practical use cases in construction, etc. Plus the videos are just fun to watch!
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Ocado's new warehouse has thousands of robots zooming around a grid system to pack groceries. The thousands of robots can process 65,000 orders every week. They communicate on a 4G network to avoid bumping into each other. Is this the future of retail?
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this videos shows the inside of the new Ocado warehouse in UK. This warehouse is making its way top Canada, with Sobeys opening one soon: http://fmcs.digital/blog/u-k-s-ocado-taps-into-canadas-online-grocery-market-with-sobeys-tie-up-is-canada-mature-enough-to-have-automated-grocery-fulfillment-centers-ecommerce-robots/
Kodilla's curator insight,
October 31, 2018 10:47 AM
This is the future of the retail industry, robots are so much more efficient and they don't need a paycheck
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The last mile is seeing disruption from new business models that address customer demand for ever-faster delivery, as well as new technologies such as drones and autonomous ground vehicles.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: delivery is the last problem to solve to continue ecommerce growth. McKinsey explores the different delivery models for the last mile in this article.
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Unleash the bots! Automation has emerged as a critical issue in the US following a 2016 election that focused largely on jobs and plans to save them. Though a significant amount of attention has been directed towards autonomous driving as a potential job killer, specifically for long-haul trucking, delivery robots appear poised to go mainstream much sooner.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT We think of robots as fixed machines that assemble cars. However, with the advances in autonomous driving we may see an explosion of delivery robots. We have seen experiments with the use of drones to deliver products (Amazon and others) and now we are seeing self driving robots appear on the streets as it is much easier to get permits for those than it is for flying objects that can crash and hurt people. This is important because delivery remains the Achille's heel of eCommerce (slow, expensive): whoever cracks this problem and comes up with a low cost and economical solution will make a killing.
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Curated by Farid Mheir
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WHY IT MATTERS: the acquisition of robotics for Ocado fulfillment centers could be seen as one more tech announcement. But buried in this Fortune article is this quote from Ocado CTO that summarizes the ultimate goal of grocery eCommerce: dark warehouses with robots doing all the work.
This may sound very futuristic but in fact it is the consequence of the grocery eCommerce business model: the only way to make money is to have robots to the work that consumers do when pushing carts in the store.