AutoStore Holdings Ltd. last week said it it has surpassed 300 installations across North America. The company also promoted Mike Dickson as president of the Americas to lead its next phase of growth.
Dickson gave Automated Warehouse insight into AutoStore’s latest automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) deployment, its customer-focused approach, and more.
The milestone installation was at Medline’s new site in Aurora, Colo., with its longtime integration partner, Swisslog. Over a decade ago, Medline was AutoStore’s first North American customer.
“What the Medline story says to me is that we’ve built a system that they can count on as their business evolves and as their customer demands increase,” said Dickson. “They need quicker deliveries and quicker turnaround. We’ve been able to grow with them and support that ability for them to satisfy their customers.”
Today, Medline operates over 20 AutoStore systems across the U.S., deploying 1,900 robots to support high-throughput fulfillment and enable next-day delivery to 95% of its customers in the U.S.
AutoStore marks progress since first North American deployment
While AutoStore’s ASRS is known for its grid design and mobile bin-picking robots, it has still grown and evolved since first debuting in the U.S. The company is on the fifth generation of its system and continues to iterate in response to customer needs. This includes new battery technology with improved charging times, robots that can handle larger bins, and more.
The company has also worked to integrate more artificial intelligence into its system. It recently released CarouselAI, an AI-powered robotic piece picking port. AutoStore also offers the Router traffic management software.
“Router learns and improves,” explained Dickson. “People who deployed Router back in 2020 are actually seeing 10%+ improvement in their picking speed and picking accuracy. This is just because of the built-in intelligence that Router brings.”
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Integrators enable quick installations
Working closely with integrators has long been a part of AutoStore’s growth strategy. When it comes to Medline’s growth with AutoStore through the years, Dickson said Swisslog was an instrumental partner.
“I know we couldn’t have done it without Swisslog,” Dickson said. “Their ability to marry up the AutoStore system with other upstream and downstream solutions, with their SYNQ software, makes the AutoStore solution an even more powerful piece of the puzzle to help solve our customers’ problems.”
Over the years, AutoStore has developed a number of tools and programs to help its integrators seamlessly deploy its technology, he added.
“We have what’s called our Academy Program, and it’s a very in-depth training program to help catch up our partners on all things AutoStore,” recalled Dickson. “We’ve also developed tools like Unify Analytics, which give our customers and our partners insight into how their systems are performing and where they may be having challenges.”
Many of these tools are geared towards helping AutoStore’s integration partners, and they have helped the company grow. Now, however, AutoStore aims to build tighter relationships with its customers, Dickson said.
AutoStore to work more directly with customers
“As our customer base grows to over 1,100 customers in over 1,600 sites, we need to also get closer to our customers,” asserted Dickson. “These are our joint customers, so strategically, nothing’s changing. We will continue to sell with and through our partners, but we need to develop tighter relations with these end customers as well, to better understand their needs and challenges in the market.”
AutoStore has already started to do this in limited ways with select pilots. It has now reassigned much of its team to get better feedback from more of its customers.
“We think we can learn more and better serve all customers by being closer to the end customer and hearing their specific inputs and feedback,” Dickson said.
The company’s goal is to build more relationships like those it has with Medline, Best Buy, Puma, and others. These are multi-site deployments with deep customer integration.
“AutoStore is really more than just a warehouse system or robotic piece-picking system,” Dickson said. “It really is a tool that helps empower our customers to respond to their customer demands, and Medline is a great example of that.”
Across North America, AutoStore’s 300 installations now move millions of products daily, with more than 21,000 robots in operation.
The company isn’t just growing in one region. AutoStore last week said it has surpassed 1,100 installations across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).
