Warehouse Robotics Deployment

If your fulfillment operation feels like a treadmill that keeps speeding up, you are not imagining it. Same-day shipping expectations are spreading beyond the big marketplaces. At the same time, warehouse labor is tighter than it used to be, and walking is still the biggest hidden tax in picking. When pickers spend half their day traveling, even a good team starts to look slow on paper.

That is the real problem robotics is trying to solve: not science fiction, not replacing every human in the building, but cutting the wasted motion that makes it hard to hit service levels without adding headcount.

Pressure points that make picking feel impossible

Most brands do not start looking at robots because they love gadgets. They start because the math stops working. You add orders, you add SKUs, you add channels, and your pick paths turn into spaghetti. The warehouse might be fine at 2,000 orders a day, and then a promotion hits and the same building suddenly feels too small.

Here is the part that stings: it is not always a process problem. Sometimes it is a geography problem. If your pickers are walking farther because fast movers have shifted, or because slotting has not kept up with SKU growth, you can train all day and still lose time to steps.

What AMRs actually do in a real warehouse

Autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs, are not usually picking items off shelves. In most deployments, they move the cart, the tote, or the work surface, and they do it in a way that cuts travel time and keeps pickers in tighter zones.

Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, describes the robots G10 is using in plain English: "The robot is round, it looks like an industrial Roomba. It picks a cart up, and it knows the weights, the dimensions, everything about the products." She adds that the system uses efficient pick paths and zoning so that pickers stay in a smaller area while the work moves through the building. "When my zone is done, the cart continues on to another employee." fileciteturn1file7

Why deployment is the hard part, not the purchase

Buying robots is easy compared to making them useful. The hard part is deciding where they fit into your process, what happens when something goes off script, and how you keep accuracy high while you change the flow of work. If your robotics rollout forces people to guess, you will trade speed for errors, which is a bad deal.

A practical deployment plan starts with your order profile. Are you mostly single line orders, or multi line carts? Do you have heavy items that change how carts should be packed? Do you need wave picking, batch picking, or zone picking? Robotics should match the way your orders behave, not the other way around.

What good results look like

The payoff should be visible in a few places: lines per hour, fatigue, and consistency across shifts. Woods points to the metric that matters in a pick driven operation: "We have seen great efficiency gains in picks per line or lines per hour. Sometimes 3X the amount of efficiency there." fileciteturn1file7

That type of jump does not come from magic. It comes from cutting the dead time between picks, and from keeping people focused on the part humans do best: making good decisions at the shelf, not walking marathons between locations.

How G10 approaches robotics inside a live operation

At G10, robotics is not treated as a showroom trick. It is treated like an operations project that has to work under real customer volume. Woods notes she has been traveling to support the robotics integration work at the Delavan location while also stabilizing other operational changes across the network. fileciteturn1file7

Mark Becker, CEO and founder of G10 Fulfillment, frames it in a simple way: "We are doing one of the coolest things in the world... which is we have autonomous robots in our Delavan warehouse." He also points out the practical reality of a pilot style deployment: "There are days we have 10, 12 Zebra developers back in the warehouse... training these robots." fileciteturn1file8

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, ties the robotics work back to what customers actually care about. "We are introducing the Zebra robots into Delavan to start. We have seen fabulous results, a huge increase in productivity. The warehouse employees are really embracing this technology." fileciteturn1file16

Questions worth asking before you roll robots onto the floor

Robotics is not a universal answer. You need to know what problem you are solving. If you are missing ship cutoffs because your pickers are walking too far, AMRs can help. If you are missing ship cutoffs because your inventory is not accurate, you may need scan discipline and WMS fixes first. If your slotting is broken, robots will move you faster in the wrong direction.

It is also worth thinking about integration. Robots have to live inside the same world as your WMS, your labor planning, and your reporting. If the systems do not talk cleanly, your team ends up doing manual workarounds, and the whole point of robotics disappears.

Where G10 can help

If you are considering robotics because you need speed without chaos, the best next step is to map your order profile and your process, then match the technology to the work. G10 was founded in 2009, and supports B2B and D2C fulfillment with a nationwide footprint, same-day shipping, and HAZMAT-compliant operations. Robotics is one tool in that toolbox, not the only one.

If you want to see what a practical deployment looks like, and whether robotics makes sense for your SKU mix and volume, ask G10 for a walkthrough of the workflow. You will leave with a clearer picture of what would change, what would not, and how to protect accuracy while you chase faster pick rates.