The holiday season is one of the busiest times of the year for warehouses and distribution centers. Traditionally, companies like FedEx and UPS have relied on seasonal workers to meet this demand, but another option has emerged. Now, more than ever, logistics companies are turning to collaborative robots to fulfill holiday orders.
Automation is far from a new trend, but many warehouses have been slow to adopt it. As the holidays get busier and finding new workers gets harder, that’s starting to change. This year’s holiday shipping season will see more cobots in action than ever before.
This may be a landmark year for cobot adoption, but reliance on these robots won’t end here. Cobots will become an essential part of the logistics industry as more companies experience the benefits firsthand.
The Impact of Holiday Demand
To grasp the potential of cobots in the sector, it helps to understand how busy the holidays are for these companies. In 2019, the USPS alone delivered around 800 million packages between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. That’s more than two packages for every person who lives in the U.S., and that’s just one service.
Online holiday shopping sales have increased by at least $10 billion every year since 2015. With e-commerce exploding like that, pressure on the logistics industry keeps rising. If companies only relied on seasonal hires to meet this demand, they’d have to hire more workers every year.
A warehouse can only hold so many workers, so the help from new hires eventually hits a point of diminishing returns. The industry also faces a dramatic labor shortage, making it difficult to find enough employees for the holidays. These challenges come about every year, but 2020 has brought a unique set of hardships, too.
COVID Complications
The COVID-19 pandemic presents two considerable challenges to the logistics industry for the holidays. First, warehouses can’t house as many workers at once due to social distancing guidelines. As a result, they can’t hire as many seasonal workers as they have in the past.
Second, online shopping has skyrocketed throughout the year, and the holiday season is no exception. According to one survey, 75% of American shoppers will do some of their holiday shopping online, and 43% will exclusively shop online. This rise in e-commerce translates to more packages, putting even more demand on logistics companies.
The shipping industry is facing an unprecedented challenge, but cobots provide an answer. Here’s a closer look at how these robots are saving the industry amid these complications.
1. Improving Efficiency
The most immediately apparent benefit of cobots is that they drive efficiency. By automating some actions, warehouses free employees to focus on others, doing more with the same amount of workers. Technology allows businesses to automate up to 45% of tasks, saving human workers a considerable amount of time.
In traditional distribution centers, workers may have to walk the warehouse’s entire length to find a needed item. This picking method is highly inefficient, so it’s an ideal application for cobots. Robots can pick products for employees while they focus on other tasks like quality inspections or loading.
Robots may come with a high upfront price, but facilities can keep using them every year. Over time, the costs of cobot ownership and operation are far less than another employee’s salary. They enable logistics companies to boost efficiency while keeping costs down.
2. Maximizing Flexibility
Many companies have resisted automation in the past because robots are typically less flexible than human workers. Highly specialized machines are excellent at specific tasks, but if a facility needs to shift operations, they can get in the way. Cobots, which work alongside people instead of replacing them, provide an ideal middle ground.
Cobots are flexible by design, made to function in various workspaces instead of being tailored to one specific situation. Warehouses don’t have to rearrange their floorplan or adjust their operations much to incorporate them. Since cobots are designed to work with people, they can start as quickly as a person would.
Cobots make it easy to balance automation with new hires. Companies don’t have to choose between hiring people and automating but can do both. For example, XPO Logistics Inc. ramped up cobot adoption by 30% while hiring 20,000 seasonal employees this year.
3. Ensuring Safety
Cobots have also made it easier for warehouses to keep employees safe amid the pandemic. Placing them in stations between workers ensures people adhere to social distancing regulations. Cobots also help facilities meet demand while they can’t hire as many people due to new building capacity limits.
Enabling social distancing isn’t the only way cobots improve safety, either. They can work safely close to humans by design, not needing any extra guarding or safety measures. Unlike some traditional machines, they don’t put nearby workers at risk, making facilities safer places overall.
A lot of discussions focus on automating repetitive or undesirable tasks. Cobots can also take over work that would be dangerous for humans, like reaching high shelves or lifting heavy objects. With robots handling these jobs, warehouse employees don’t have to worry about many work-related injuries.
Today’s Cobots Are Just the Beginning
This holiday season is seeing a surge in cobot adoption, but the cobot craze is far from over. If enough companies see benefits from them this season, it will lead to higher adoption rates in the future. With more implementation, these machines will also become more useful.
Some experts predict that there will be 4 million industrial robots across 50,000 warehouses within five years. All those robots represent valuable data points that companies can use to find the best use for future automation. As more facilities use cobots, it’ll become clear what their greatest strengths and weaknesses are.
With this data, companies can implement robots more effectively, and cobot manufacturers can see where to improve. With each new generation of machines, automation will be more flexible, cost-effective and safe than before. The logistics industry could be on the verge of a cobot revolution, and it starts this holiday season.
Cobots Are the Future of the Logistics Industry
Right now, collaborative robots are a useful resource for logistics companies facing an unusual amount of hardship. Before long, facilities that don’t utilize this technology to some extent will be uncommon. Automation through cobots will become an industry standard.
2020 has been unusual, and not all its challenges and changes will go away. The extremes of this year have highlighted how much advances like cobots can help. Lasting, positive changes will result, and the logistics industry only stands to benefit.
