The holiday hiring frenzy is under way and robots are joining the rush to seasonal jobs, reports The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 29, 2019). Retailers and logistics operators facing a tight labor market are ramping up automation at warehouses for the holidays, when online order volumes can surge tenfold as consumers load up digital shopping carts in the weeks around Thanksgiving and Christmas. To cope, some businesse are ordering up extra fleets of collaborative robots, or “cobots,” that use cameras, lasers and sensors to navigate warehouse aisles and lead workers to the right shelves or to shuttle bins full of products between workstations.
France-based Geodis SA is boosting its robotic workforce by 75% to help workers at its U.S. warehouses fulfill fast-fashion orders during the holiday peak. This year the company, which plans to bring on between 6,000 and 7,000 human workers for the holiday period, is placing a total of 281 robot units at 5 locations. XPO Logistics, which is hiring 20,000 humans for the seasonal rush, is advancing its purchase of millions of dollars’ worth of robots the company expects to need next year so it can use them now to manage the spike in e-commerce orders. Locus Robotics said demand for “surge robots” to bolster the armies of seasonal warehouse workers has grown this year, and the company is sending more than 500 of them to its logistics and e-commerce customers.
Although most warehouses still rely largely on people pulling carts or driving forklifts, scarcity of labor and the push for faster delivery are accelerating automation at warehouses. By 2025 about 28% of warehouses globally will deploy commercial robots, compared to around 3% in 2018. The companies are looking for help in the labor-intensive business of storing, sorting and packing goods for shipment, especially around the holidays, when retailers and logistics providers add tens of thousands of extra workers.
Classroom discussion questions:
- In what ways can cobots help the logistics industry?
- What exactly is a collaborative robot?