Walmart is expanding its use of robots in stores to help monitor inventory, clean floors and unload trucks, part of the retail giant’s efforts to control labor costs as it spends more to raise wages and offer new services like online grocery delivery, reports Supply & Demand Chain Executive (April 12, 2019). At least 300 stores this year will add machines that scan shelves for out-of-stock products. Autonomous floor scrubbers will be deployed in 1,500 stores to help speed up cleaning. And the number of conveyor belts that automatically scan and sort products as they come off trucks will double, to 1,200.
The company said the addition of a single machine can cut a few hours a day of work previously done by a human, or allow Walmart to allocate fewer people to complete a task, a large saving when spread around 4,600 U.S. stores. Executives are focused on giving workers more time to do other tasks, and on hiring in growing areas like e-commerce. Store workers spend 2-3 hours a day driving a floor scrubber through a store using the manual machines.
The automatic conveyor belts cut the number of workers needed to unload trucks by half, from 8 to 4 workers. An additional 900 stores will also get 16-foot-high towers that let shoppers pick up online orders without interacting with a human.
Retailers and other companies that hire large numbers of low-skilled hourly workers are increasingly looking to automation as they face higher labor costs and aim to improve retention amid the lowest unemployment in decades. Target added machines to count cash to backrooms of stores last year, following a similar move by Walmart.
Classroom discussion questions:
- In what other ways can automation be used at Walmart to increase OM efficiency?
- What is driving this expansion of automation?