Problem
CEVA Logistics has transported over 22,500,000 tons of ground freight, and has completed over a billion order lines shipped to eCommerce customers. Demand for eCommerce sales have increased drastically since the pandemic, with sales increasing by $244.2 billion in 2020, according to a 2020 Annual Tratil Trade Survey release.
While eCommerce orders have increased greatly, labor hasn’t, creating an opportunity for logistics companies, like CEVA, to give themselves an edge by turning to automation.
CEVA’s Grobbendonk warehouse, located in Belgium’s Antwerp province, spans 50,000 square meters (538,195.5 square feet), creating many situations where employees have to spend time and effort walking back and forth across the massive warehouse.
Solution
CEVA deployed 27 Geek+ P-series picking robots and five workstations at its Grobbendonk warehouse. Geek+’s P-series is made up of its P40 autonomous mobile robot (AMR), which can lift items up to 700 mm, and its P500, P800 and P1200 robots, which slide underneath shelves to pick them up and move them across warehouses.
The P-series offers ROI in less than 3 years, and can increase the efficiency of manual labor by up to three times and accuracy by up to 99%. These AMRs can also reduce labor by 50-70%. The robots also make labor less intensive by bringing goods to human workers, so human workers don’t have to walk across the warehouse for every item.
“At CEVA, we define innovation as the implementation of new ideas with business impact,” Bart Beeks, Global Head of Contract Logistics at CEVA Logistics, said. “As a result, we are always looking for the best solutions for our clients, scanning the technology horizon alongside our partners. The Geek+ solution is a great fit for our operation in Grobbendonk, providing a more comfortable working environment for on-site employees, while at the same time handling a far greater order volume.”
CEVA deployed a similar Geek+ system in an Australian warehouse in 2021. This distribution center is one of the largest in the southern hemisphere, and Geek+’s success there led CEVA to pick the company for its Grobbendonk warehouse.
Results
The goods-to-person solution devised by CEVA and Geek+ gives CEVA’s warehouse a high degree of flexibility, and can handle daily volumes of more than 10,000 outbound items.
“This project with CEVA once again demonstrates what Geek+ can do for retail operations and warehouse operators,” Jean Gateau, Global Key Account Director at Geek+, said. “We have already had great success with CEVA in Australia, and it’s fantastic that we can reproduce that in Europe, too.”
In a related story, Geek+ recently announced that its deployed fleet of p-series robots picked more than 10B items over the last year.
