Geek+ has extended its cooperation with Decathlon, one of the world’s largest retailers of sporting goods, present in over 50 countries with more than 1,600 stores globally. Following the success of a two-year collaboration in its e-commerce and retail fulfillment centers in Shanghai, Decathlon accelerated its automation program, with AMR deployments at two new sites in China. The installations were successfully deployed remotely in under 3 months, following strict pandemic restrictions.
After its first deployment of Geek+ goods-to-person AMRs to its warehouses in 2018, Decathlon was able to triple the average productivity of labor, increase inventory capacity by 40%, secure RoI in under 3 years and rapidly scale up its automation at short notice without having to make any large investments. With a proven track record, coupled with the capability of Geek+ systems to integrate RFID technology, Decathlon then decided to increase deployments.
Technology from Geek+ gave Decathlon the flexibility to quickly scale up operations and the ability to manage a fast pace of change, which proved particularly important earlier this year when the onset of the coronavirus in China led to the closing down of all physical stores, a dramatic escalation in online demand, and extensive labor shortages:
· With the support of the Geek+ system, Decathlon was able to achieve full 24/7 automated operations in one of its warehouses in Shanghai.
· Similarly, in Beijing, the company managed to deploy 72 new AMRs in one of its warehouses, using collaborative digital tools like Zoom and WeChat for online training.
· Lastly, in order to deal with the high demand in e-commerce, Decathlon was able to flexibly relocate robots from its retail warehouse to its e-commerce warehouse, demonstrating the effectiveness and ability of Geek+ solutions to ensure business continuity in today’s volatile business environment.
The successful implementation of Geek+ systems in Decathlon’s warehouses has been studied by independent research firm, Interact Analysis - a global market intelligence company specializing in supply chain automation. In a new joint whitepaper, Interact Analysis closely analyzed the Decathlon/ Geek+ partnership to obtain valuable insight into the future of logistics automation.
Ash Sharma, Senior Research Director at Interact Analysis, says: “To write this whitepaper, we worked closely with both Decathlon and Geek+; and were also given privileged access to company information. This enabled us to fully understand the rollout of the solution, and its long-term implications for the e-commerce industry. Interact Analysis’ warehouse automation research shows that, today, there are close to 100,000 distribution and fulfilment centers around the world – with less than 5% of them fully automated. Geek+ style goods-to-person robotics are seeking to change this. Some of the efficiency improvements seen at Decathlon as a result of the Geek+ solution are highly impressive – in particular a tripling of labor productivity. As this technology matures and goes mainstream, we are convinced there will be massive growth in goods-to-person robotics in the next five years. Please do click the link below and download our whitepaper to learn more!”
