Ceva Logistics has deployed autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) from Chinese company Geek+ at its warehouse in Truganina, Australia.

Ceva, a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, was looking for automation innovations to serve its Australian ecommerce clients. Implemented by Körber Supply Chain, the project improves efficiency and productivity in the warehouse, ensuring smoother order fulfilment.

“Today, an accelerated demand for fast order fulfilment has created a challenging scenario for businesses everywhere,” said Lit Fung, Geek+’s managing director for Apac, UK and Americas. “In Australia, a booming ecommerce landscape has made delivery services the determining factor of who’s going to come out on top. Using smart robot automation, Ceva has turned a challenge into an opportunity that will allow them to set the standard and gain considerable advantages.”

With upwards of 500,000 square metres of warehouse space and 1350 employees, the site in Australia is one of the largest warehouses in the southern hemisphere.

When an online shoe store experienced rapid growth, Ceva began looking at ways it could help the company meet consumers’ demands for speed and cost of delivery. Previously, Ceva would have had to add more employees to an already labour-intensive process, with 12 to 15 employees using radio-frequency picking devices to complete one order.

Today, Geek+ autonomous mobile robots intelligently and flexibly move mobile inventory racks and pallets to picking stations, saving employees time that would otherwise be spent walking around finding and picking inventory. The result is an overall improvement in employee comfort and logistical efficiency, as well as savings.

“Thanks to Geek+’s AMR technology, we now have very fast and efficient picking productivity and throughput,” said Milton Pimenta, Ceva Logistics’ managing director for Australia and New Zealand.

Following the project’s seamless implementation, Ceva saw an immediate improvement in key performance indicators, most notably a fourfold increase in picking efficiency. Ceva plans to use this to support its wider customer base.

“Ceva feel that a number of their clients could benefit from AMR technology,” said Ravi Nath, Körber Supply Chain’s head of automation for Australia and New Zealand. “As this was the first pilot project for the business, it was extremely important that we delivered on our predictions.”

Geek+ plans to continue to work closely with Körber to help scale operations across regions and support Ceva with efficient, accurate and flexible robots for the company’s network of global customers.

Geek+ has 300 global customers and has deployed more than 20,000 robots worldwide. Founded in 2015, it has over 1500 employees and is headquartered in Beijing, with offices in Germany, UK, USA, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Ceva Logistics has more than 78,000 employees working across ten regional clusters around the world.

Körber is an international technology group with about 10,000 employees and more than 100 locations worldwide.