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If it cost less to use machines to pack those boxes, you know they would be using machines and not people.
This is where I tell you that they actually made a fully automated McDonald's.
Heck, even the ones with people I've worked in are mostly automated. The people are just glorified hoppers, filling the machine and taking out the finished product. Even the grills have these big press like things that allow the meat patties to be cooked on both sides and not have to flipped! The position of "burger flipper" may not technically exist depending on the kitchen tech being used at any given location. lol
one of the issues with using robots to pack boxes is you can only assign 1 robot to one product. You can't use the same robot to pack potato chips and boxes of cat litter. It'll either crush the chips or not be able to pick up the box.
Same if the same SKU has two different packaging options: bag and box.
They already have, IIRC, 2 warehouses that are entirely robotic (they are testing facilities for a full robotic workforce) except for the humans that perform maintenance on said robots. They have the means to generalize the packing robots. But it's more expensive than a person still, as well as there still being some bugs in their specific system.
understood, but that does require further cooperation higher up the supply chain. It's harder to change suppliers or shipping lanes I imagine.
Why would they have to change anything about suppliers or shipping lanes? It's the same products being put into the same boxes, but by machines and not human hands. 🤨
Just off the top of my head: Stockouts, exceptions, recalls, availability, change in supplier, natural disasters (or similar like the Suez canal blockage), things like cyberattacks, materials shortage or inflation might cause internal or external changes both in your direct supplier or else in the manufacturers supply chain.
Consider also some warehouses are forward stocking and you might run inventory management software to ship from warehouse A while stock is above x% and switch to warehouse B if it falls below that level (or, again, your supplier's supplier might...)
Other products might have multiple ingress points to your supply chain and you have a dedicated buyer who makes changes based on the best price (perishables especially), others might be seasonally affected - either foodstuffs or things like sunglasses, winter coats, inflatable pools, pumpkin spice, christmas decorations... that are seasonable supply
Again: What does that have to do with robots in the warehouse packing boxes? Because there aren't humans? There are still administrators and such. They don't want to eliminate middle management (even though it would be easier to do that than replace the actual workforce with machines), just the laborers.
see my first reply: a packing robot can only follow directions within certain parameters and if those parameters change, a human can adapt instantly, a robot can't.
You asked how and why it might change and I gave some examples.
The packing robot has nothing to do with the supply chain though. The machine doesn't care if the products it packs come from one source or another as long as they are delivered to the same starting point and the packing robots are also not the ones ordering shit.
ok so I said
- a packing robot can't change products without reprogramming
you said
- there are two warehouses you know of that are fully robotic
I said
- that takes more organization elsewhere though, e.g. supply chain
you said
- how would supply chain affect the robots
I said
- by changing the availability of certain products in different stocking locations
if the product has to come from somewhere that isnt one of the two robot warehouses it affects the robots because they aren't being used, if the product is a different shape / size / weight or in different packaging it affects the robots as they have to be recalibrated
edit to say most warehouse robots are more like giant dumpsters that follow a human around and the human puts the products in the dumpster.
if the product has to come from somewhere that isnt one of the two robot warehouses it affects the robots because they aren't being used, if the product is a different shape / size / weight or in different packaging it affects the robots as they have to be recalibrated
No... The robots are generalized to work with any product, any shape, size, packaging, etc. That was the point made in my first comment.
Your edit shows you don't even know what kind of machines are even using used. They are absolutely not just dumpsters filled by humans. It's multiple machines, working together, controlled by an algorithm. They can adjust their behavior on the fly to fit any order. That is the entire point of these testing warehouses; to develop a 100% machine controlled warehouse.