Vanderlande helps customers find direction with warehouse automation

Warehouse operators need to balance resilience and agility amid the latest economic disruptions, and automation is part of the solution. Vanderlande, a Toyota Industries subsidiary, offers its integrated robots, software, and lifecycle services to help supply chains adopt new technologies and maximize the value of scarce staffers.

At ProMat in March, the company displayed the STOREPICK system for case picking, including its ADAPTO automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS), depalletizing and palletizing robots, and Pallet AV load carriers, and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).

Vanderlande also showed its FASTPICK with a goods-to-person (G2P) workstation and Tote AV picking robots, as well as its Load Forming Logic software.

More recently, Automated Warehouse caught up with Jake Heldenberg, director of sales engineering at Vanderlande. They discussed their impressions from the event, the company‘s latest releases, and their perspective on market challenges.

Business are learning to evolve with the market

How was ProMat 2025 for Vanderlande, and how did it compare with previous trade shows?

Heldenberg: It was the busiest Monday I think I’ve ever been a part of with Vanderlande, and that’s [after] at least 10 years going to the show.

At MODEX last year, it was kind of status quo — you talk about business, you talk about new technologies. We saw a lot of trailer unloading robots from the likes of Pickle Robot, Boston Dynamics, and Mujin, but they were big conversation pieces.

This year, the conversations felt far more targeted around business agility. They were around the future, agility in their market spaces, and finding ways to implement solutions that aren’t going to be impacted by economic developments and evolving markets.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of interest shifted to e-commerce, and now artificial intelligence and tariffs are getting a lot of attention. Are the conversations now more realistic about what technology can and can’t do?

Heldenberg: Market shifts are like a pendulum swinging. COVID forced that pendulum to swing toward e-commerce, but at some point, the market was going to swing in the other direction.

Businesses are learning how to deal with these market swings. We have no idea what’s going to happen next, whether it’s geopolitics, consumer confidence, or new technologies.

Businesses are getting smarter, especially as it pertains to supply chain and logistics. The conversations we’ve had are a little more strategic than before.

Understanding customers a competitive advantage

Vanderlande showed its latest products at ProMat. How do you differentiate yourself?

Heldenberg: Our competitive advantage isn’t just some wow product; it’s that we put the customer first, understanding their challenges. We focus on providing a solution that’s going to solve those challenges.

I don’t think any other company has successfully executed on larger or more complex systems than Vanderlande. We’ve made a name for ourselves in the market by understanding our customers needs and strengths.

It’s not just Fortune 500 customers. There are small to midsize businesses that need help picking the right solution, but not just a product. We see that a lot of the market is about a new climbing robot or a new cube-based shuttle.

But after these businesses see a nice video and buy that product, did they do the best thing to improve their profitability or grow their brands over the next five to 10 years? They’re finding the limits of automation and are missing the benefits of an overall solution.

Can you give an example of where Vanderlande and its partners provide value?

Heldenberg: If this is a customer’s first foray into automation, leveraging a company like Hai Robotics allows them to explore an ASRS while not breaking the bank and getting the flexibility to scale up at some point.

At some point, if your e-commerce order fulfillment grows to 20,000 or 40,000 cycles an hour, you might want to make that shift to a shuttle, but if you’re small and still growing, a high-lift robot might be the right investment.

We believe our core strength is really consultation, understanding the business needs, and turning that into a solution that should support that customer for the next 30 years.

Vanderlande shares trade show takeaways

What did you discuss in your trade show sessions or afterwards? What are prospective customers currently looking to learn about?

Heldenberg: We explained the importance of designing systems for piece picking — both for automation and goods-to-person stations. We focused on the importance of data analysis, understanding order profiles, and ultimately making sure that customers are finding the right partners that can walk them through a particular path to find success.

Year after year at these trade shows, you see picking robots, which are always picking perfectly. But no one has actually said, “Pick these 10 different items in order,” and customers have tens of thousands of SKUs, not all of which are 100% robot-pickable, so you have to sort some orders.

You need to cater the solution to the customer, which may care about the most value-added services, the cheapest possible product, or the fastest delivery to your door. If this is engineered to order, it’s all custom-built, but we push a lot of standardization. Short of that is modularization.

You might have a standardized G2P station for e-commerce or break-pack picking. Or you might have different variants for omnichannel or wholesale picking. The same could be said of handling totes or cases like Hai Robotics’ ACR [automated case-handling mobile robot] or using an ASRS shuttle like ADAPTO.

We’re not fooling ourselves. We recognize that if we can be at 80% on standardized modules, we’ve done a phenomenal job. There is no such thing as a single solution that fits every customer.

In addition to a modular approach, how does Vanderlande approach service and support? Aren’t SKUs constantly changing?

Heldenberg: Serviceability and standardization go hand in hand. Nearly every automation company starts out as an integrator, whether it manufactures its own equipment or not. The hardware and software of every project was engineered to a particular customer.

That’s what we used to refer to as “tribal knowledge.” Only the local onsite people or those who designed it knew the ins and outs of that particular design. If the person who worked with hardware or software left or retired, so did the knowledge.

Now, you have documentation of the way the code was written, how it was written, why it was written that way, and that it is full standard. So if a customer needs to make a change, anybody in your software department can go through that particular document, recognize the code, and go and make a simple change.

That’s a huge improvement to serviceability, as well as a huge cost reduction for the customer. Now, I think there will always will be the trend that as you continue to grow, you’ll need to find ways to be more efficient.

There are still things that a customer does that makes it unique. You need to have some flexibility, both in your service model and in your software model for that customer to continuously do that one thing that separates it from its competition and that makes its consumer base happy.

Know your partners, explains Vanderlande

So for companies just getting started with warehouse automation, how can they determine who is responsible — the IT department, operations, or the integrator?

Heldenberg: We’re not just an integrator or an OEM. There so many terms you get thrown around for Vanderlande, but I think that we need to change the narrative of what we are, and we’re a solution provider.

In addition to your customer partners, how does your company assess its vendor partners? We talked with Hai Robotics in a recent webinar.

Heldenberg: A lot of companies want to work with Vanderlande and want us to sell their products. It’s an honor and a privilege. But the important part is it takes a lot of vetting from us. Our name goes directly beside with whatever that supplier’s name is.

Its product needs to be top-tier for us. If you’re the cheapest, that’s great, but do you provide quality with that cost reduction? Does your product break down more than your competition’s product? So what is the cost in the meantime to repair? And why does it take so long?

Our customers also aren’t looking at what is the minimum capex to invest in automation. They’re really looking at “What is my total cost of ownership?” Not only do they need a business case, but they also want to know what they’re going to have to spend for the next 20 years for the automation.

We have a huge vetting process to make sure that suppliers are stable, have a culture aligned with ours, and are easy to do business with. Does a product align with our sustainability goals? Does it actually achieve all the results the company says it achieves?

It’s not something where a company comes to us and we look at them and go, “That looks great, let’s sign them up and start selling their products.” We’ve been vetting the autonomous vehicle [AV] market for four or five years already.

Humanoids aren’t a silver bullet

Are there examples of technologies both you and customers had to evaluate?

Heldenberg: Customers are still getting educated about shuttles and climbing robots. We’ve had ADAPTO going between levels since 2015, but a lot of competitors came out with robots this year.

We’ve done a lot of research and simulations. One of the biggest things that companies are learning is that throughput is limited by the footprint of cross-aisle traffic. If you decouple the shuttle and hand off that task off to another piece of equipment, that might be the most efficient form of working.

When you talk about scaling up use of a climbing robot, did you account for enough footprint to future-proof that automation? It’s based on the customer’s product flow, their layout, and the people they have present.

I hate to pick on humanoid robots, but at ProMat two years ago, they were picking up totes and bringing them to lifts, which then took them to the conveyor. Is that truly the most efficient way of working?

You decouple tasks to make automation more efficient and simpler, so the robots break down less. Humanoids are no silver bullets that are going to replace all the automation that has been developed today.