Locus Robotics in use at Boots warehouse

Locus Robotics has announced that it has passed the 250 million units picked volume level heading into the 2020 holiday peak season. Locus robots now pick more than 10,000 units every 15 minutes, a 263% increase in units picked compared to the same period last year.

Locus's milestone reflects the rapidly growing volumes at customer sites throughout this pandemic-impacted year, with some customers' daily orders often reaching Black Friday levels. Across the installed base, Locus is now regularly exceeding volume levels of 1 million picks per day.

"Our extraordinary productivity stats underscore the critical value Locus brings to our partners around the world who are facing rising volumes and limited labour availability," says Rick Faulk, CEO of Locus Robotics. "With the pandemic, the 2020 holiday season is presenting challenges to fulfilment businesses everywhere. As consumers purchase - and return - many goods online, our ability to support both picking and putaway delivers tremendous flexibility and value to our customers, while providing the significant productivity improvements they demand."

In addition to enhancing productivity, the Locus solution helps to enforce social distancing health safety measures by minimising worker-to-worker interaction in warehouse environments, significantly reducing worker absences and attrition.

"Our ongoing work using robotics in our warehouses, and our partnership with Locus continues to be important to the success of our e-commerce business, ensuring that our fulfilment centre operations are optimised even in the face of seasonal peaks and COVID-19," says Adam Coventry, head of warehousing at Boots UK.

Global customers, including CEVA, DHL, Boots UK, GEODIS, Port Logistics Group, Verst Logistics, Radial, and others, are doubling or tripling their fulfilment productivity while lowering labour recruitment, training and retention costs.