ASICS runs with intelligent robots

Autonomous sup­port for pick­ing B2B orders

Head­quar­tered in Kobe, Japan, ASICS is a lead­ing designer, man­u­fac­turer and retailer of high-per­for­mance ath­letic footwear, apparel and acces­sories. Founded in 1949 by Kihachiro Onit­suka, the com­pany name is derived from the Latin say­ing Anima Sana In Cor­pore Sano (“A Sound Mind in a Sound Body”), and this maxim con­tin­ues to guide the activ­i­ties of the orga­ni­za­tion as a whole.

Profil

Mag­a­zino devel­ops and builds per­cep­tion-con­trolled, mobile robots. As the largest Advanced Robot­ics team in Europe, we rev­o­lu­tion­ize the world of intral­o­gis­tics together with our customers.

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Use Case ASICS: Autonomous sup­port in small-scale B2B and e‑commerce business

ASICS has regional oper­a­tions in Japan, the Amer­i­cas, Europe and Ocea­nia, as well as South, East and South­east Asia, dis­trib­ut­ing prod­ucts to over 150 coun­tries and regions world­wide. The com­pany also oper­ates the clas­sic Onit­suka footwear and the HAGLOFS out­door brand.

ASICS cur­rently uses six Mag­a­zino robots in the Euro­pean Dis­tri­b­u­tion Cen­ter (EDC) at its Krefeld site in Ger­many. Here, multi-chan­nel orders for ASICS EMEA are processed. The cur­rent devel­op­ment shows a strong growth in the small parts B2B and espe­cially e‑commerce busi­ness, which is sup­ported with the six robots.

By using the TORU robot, ASICS in Krefeld is build­ing on a flex­i­ble automa­tion of the man­ual pick­ing process in the shoe ware­house. The robots work in par­al­lel with the employ­ees in the shelv­ing sys­tem on an area of around 500 square metres and are active in the out­bound process. The shoe boxes are handed over to pick carts which are posi­tioned at the ends of the shelf rows and taken over by ASICS employees.

In a next devel­op­ment step, the trans­fer of shoe boxes in the out­bound process to a con­veyor sys­tem can be imple­mented. In com­bi­na­tion with the con­veyor and a fully autonomous pack­ag­ing machine for sin­gle and dou­ble orders, a fully auto­mated out­bound process — from the shelf to the load­ing into the carrier’s truck — is then possible.

The con­nec­tion to the local ware­house man­age­ment sys­tem (WMS) from ASICS works via a stan­dard inter­face between the WMS and the Mag­a­zino fleet man­age­ment tool. This fleet man­age­ment tool com­mu­ni­cates the indi­vid­ual pick­ing orders via WLAN to the indi­vid­ual robot.

»With the Magazino robots, we can not only cover the increasing order volume better and ensure our flexibility in automation, but also support our EDC staff in the fast storage and retrieval of orders — especially for very small orders. We also see the TORU robot as an opportunity to become even better in terms of speed, quality assurance, same-day order processing and overnight picking.«
Michael Gryszko-Prattes - Head of European Distribution Center, ASICS

The mobile pick­ing robot TORU works com­pletely autonomously with the help of 3D cam­era tech­nol­ogy, numer­ous sen­sors and laser scan­ners and can work both at week­ends and at night. TORU is able to absorb the typ­i­cal order peaks of e‑commerce and there­fore improve cus­tomer ser­vice by pro­cess­ing orders faster.

With the use of intel­li­gent robots, ASICS is one of the pio­neers in effi­cient small batch pick­ing and e‑commerce. This is because the con­tin­u­ing growth in online trade and ever smaller batch sizes require automa­tion solu­tions that can be flex­i­bly adapted and scaled as required.

Title image source: Gold­beck GmbH

Robots in action

https://www.magazino.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/mag_toru_front_2400x782_02.jpg

TORU

Autonomous pick­ing robot
for shoe boxes

Pick-by-Robot

LLOYD Shoes

You have an appli­ca­tion and would like to know how Mag­a­zino robots can be used in your company?

Find out now!

Sebastian Brejc

Sales Manager

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