Chinese autonomous case-handling robotics (ACR) firm Hai Robotics has announced its first project in the UK with Chinese cross-border warehouse operator Winit as it gears up to deliver holiday shopping parcels.

The project provides 120,000 storage locations with shelving height of 4.3 metres in a 10,000 square metre warehouse in Tamworth, Staffordshire, UK. By deploying 100 Haipick A42 robots and 16 on-conveyor picking workstations in the warehouse, goods-handling efficiency is improved three to four folds over manual work with a daily handling volume of up to 50,000 pieces.

Warehouse owner Winit is a Shanghai-based provider of cross-border ecommerce and runs overseas warehousing and distribution services in Australia, the USA and several European countries. With the project going live, it saw its warehouse throughput spiked, comfortably accommodating the inrushing order-fulfilment requests for cross-border warehousing and logistics from merchants around the world, driven by the online shopping boom since the Covid-19 lockdown.

Demands for global warehousing services has surged with the flourishing cross-border ecommerce businesses. Custom statistics indicate that in 2020, Chinese cross-border trade volume amounted to RMB1.69tn, rising 31.1% from the previous year and the figure is estimated to go up to RMB16tn in 2021. By 2020, the number of overseas warehouses owned by Chinese operators exceeded 1800, totalling more than 12 million square metres in land area.

However, cross-border warehouse operators are often confronted with some hard nuts to crack. To start with, a major issue that has been constantly vexing warehouse owners who operate overseas is staffing shortage and rising hiring cost for local labour. They also found it a headache to maintain a stable workforce as their warehouses are often located near commercial hubs in industrialised countries with above-average wage levels. Automating their warehouses has become a pressing issue.

The second challenge is the huge number of SKUs owned by different merchants, which could range from consumer electronics to baby toys. This has raised concerns of storage density and picking efficiency. To meet consumers’ growing demands for short parcels delivery times, furnishing a warehouse with robots that can handle complex order-fulfilment tasks can be rewarding.

Last, flexible warehousing technology that can be swiftly deployed weighs heavily for cross-border warehouse owners whose growing businesses can’t wait for too long.

With the Haipick A42 robot that allows picking and sorting with eight loads in one movement, one worker can handle 450 pieces of goods per hour, which is three to four times faster than manual work. This has also improved storage density by 130% with spaces from 0.25 to 6.5m high being fully used. The system, which supports intelligent totes identification and labels reading, claims 99.99% picking and sorting accuracy.

Kane Luo, vice president of sales at Hai Robotics, said a customised plan was made for the project to improve performance, including elevated storage density and innovative workflows to facilitate necessary manual work.

“We were primarily obliged to provide an ACR system,” said Luo. “However, we’ve taken into consideration the whole process from inbounds to packaging of outbound goods. The workstations were also ergonomically redesigned according to overseas standards.”

Founded in 2016 with headquarters in Shenzhen, China, Hai Robotics has set up five subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, USA and Netherlands, serving customers from more than 30 countries and regions. It now has over 1200 staff, more than half of whom are engineers. The company has acquired more than 600 global patents for core intellectual properties involving positioning, robot control and warehouse management. In the latest C and D rounds of funding in 2021, the company raised over $200m.