US companies Fetch Robotics and Vargo have worked together on an integrated fulfilment system.

Californian firm Fetch specialises in cloud robotics while Ohio-based Vargo provides material-handling systems integration, warehouse execution software and equipment for major fulfilment and distribution centres.

The system will combine the power of Fetch’s autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) with Vargo’s Cofe continuous order fulfilment engine, a warehouse execution system (WES) that helps distribution centres optimise order fulfilment with technology in real time.

The growth of ecommerce and omnichannel fulfilment has pushed companies to optimise their order fulfilment processes to gain efficiencies and to do so with more speed and accuracy. This trend has been accelerated by Covid-19, which has placed additional strain on distribution centres to increase throughput while keeping employees socially distanced.

Many companies have begun applying more automation in their systems in response to this pressure and are integrating social distancing into the workflows by dynamically reassigning tasks to specific workers and orchestrating AMR movement. This enables distribution centres to maintain high worker productivity and high worker safety at the same time.

“Distribution centres today are under more pressure than ever before, both in terms of operational efficiency and worker safety,” said Stefan Nusser, chief product officer at Fetch Robotics. “To contend with steadily growing order volumes and an on-going labour shortage, distribution and fulfilment centres must embrace smarter technology to keep fulfilment operations running. Cofe’s history of providing system-wide pick optimisation and orchestration across different workflows and types of automation equipment makes it a perfect complement to robot-assisted picking.”

The combination from Fetch and Vargo lets a single system provide optimised piece, batch and case picking workflows with payloads up to 1.5 tons for ecommerce, retail distribution and omnichannel operations.

The Cofe, built on over five decades of warehouse industry know-how, is the only WES that controls all the processes that take place inside a distribution centre, from material handling equipment to the devices, people and processes. Cofe’s pull-based fulfilment optimisation can yield efficiency gains of over 30 per cent compared with sites driven by traditional waved and push-based warehouse management systems.

When combined with Fetch’s AMRs, Cofe can offer further efficiency gains by allowing workers to spend more time picking as opposed to moving material manually throughout a facility and can use insights about overall warehouse operations to improve robot workflows.

“As ecommerce fulfilment operators face ever-increasing pressure to reduce labour and deliver higher levels of production in a more scalable and flexible way, the combination of Vargo and Fetch Robotics, under this alliance, provides powerful and compelling fulfilment,” said Bart Cera, president and COO of Vargo. “We are excited about our company’s formal alignment with Fetch Robotics to further deliver industry-leading, robust and expansive solutions for the challenges that ecommerce and distribution operations face.”

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Fetch Robotics combines autonomous mobile robotics with the power of the cloud. Its cloud robotics platform provides on-demand automation for material handling and inventory management, with the power to find, track and move almost anything in any facility.