6 River Systems (6RS), part of global commerce company Shopify Inc. (NYSE: SHOP), has announced plans to launch its latest innovation, the Mobile Fulfillment app, part of a series of new tools designed to increase speed and efficiency within a warehouse.
The Mobile Fulfillment app is built on 6RS’ cloud-based fulfillment execution system (FES) to facilitate the picking of items outside the reach of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) due to product size, weight, or warehouse location. This creates a unified user experience for warehouse associates who previously had to learn and use multiple systems to complete these tasks.
6RS’ Mobile Fulfillment app leverages the benefits of the FES to streamline the routing of work, reduce training time over traditional systems, and enhance data tracking to provide better visibility and operational insights. By pairing the power of the FES with existing warehouse equipment such as walkie riders, forklifts, and man-ups, the initial release of the Mobile Fulfillment app addresses the challenges commonly associated with AMR picking systems.
“With today’s macro-economic climate, many operators are looking for ways to extend the life of their current systems and assets rather than take on long and expensive projects,” Jerome Dubois, VP of Shopify Logistics and co-founder of 6 River Systems, said. “The 6RS Mobile Fulfillment app will extend existing WMS solutions to improve warehouse operations. When combined with our automation solutions, like our robot Chuck, the mobile app improves wall-to-wall accuracy, productivity, and SLA times.”
“6RS Chucks have proved to be an invaluable asset in our facilities, delivering strong results across the board. From that success, we wanted to explore how we could further leverage 6RS technology to optimize warehouse operations,” Brandon Hetrick, plant manager at Parker Hannifin, said. “We expect the new Mobile Fulfillment app will allow us to standardize our outbound task execution and training, improve process quality, and capitalize on efficiency improvements.”
In addition to the Mobile Fulfillment app, 6RS announced three new technical features to its fulfillment execution system, available to customers today. These include:
- Mobile sort for multiple work areas: 6RS’ Mobile Sort process now provides a simple, modern user experience to perform the post-pick sortation of batched orders spanning multiple zones (i.e., picks across mezzanine floors). Customers get the benefits of powerful batching and allocation algorithms, improving operator productivity with end-to-end visibility provided in one system.
- Language translation: All 6RS user interfaces, including The Bridge (6RS’ management console), Chuck, and Universal Terminal, now support Spanish (Mexico), Czech, Dutch, and Polish, and allow languages to be assigned per user. This speeds up training and associate engagement, which can improve productivity and reduce errors over more manual systems. It also opens up new job opportunities to a broader demographic, helping to ease labor availability pressures for warehouse managers.
- Improved system usability: New system enhancements offer improved efficiency and decreased training time over conventional operations. An update to the Chuck user experience for picking enables associates to quickly identify the correct destination container for picked items, and enhanced logging in the Bridge helps operations managers reduce the time it takes to track down order wave processing issues.
The Mobile Fulfillment app is currently in testing with a select group of warehouse partners, and is expected to be commercially available in Q3 2023.
You can catch our recent interview with Rylan Hamilton, CEO and co-founder of 6 River Systems on The Robot Report Podcast episode 108.
