LLOYD Shoes

LLOYD Shoes GmbH has stood for the high­est qual­ity in shoe pro­duc­tion since 1888. Founded by H. F. Meyer in Bre­men, Ger­many, LLOYD is expand­ing world­wide and is now estab­lished inter­na­tion­ally through the LLOYD Con­cept Stores and there­fore per­son­ally avail­able to cus­tomers in var­i­ous regions. LLOYD cur­rently sells its prod­ucts, which are avail­able in more than 56 coun­tries world­wide, at around 3,350 points of sale. In 2018, LLOYD Shoes GmbH employed an aver­age of 1,792 peo­ple, 715 of them in Ger­many alone.

In Decem­ber 2019 the first two mobile pick­ing robots were deliv­ered from Mag­a­zino to Sulin­gen, the head­quar­ters of LLOYD. From here, the dis­tri­b­u­tion for LLOYD’s 28 con­cept stores world­wide as well as for LLOYD’s online busi­ness is han­dled. The TORU robots autonomously store and pick shoes in the shelv­ing sys­tems over an area of around 700 square meters. TORU can work along­side humans and there­fore pro­vide active sup­port, espe­cially dur­ing order peaks and at periph­eral times. Laser scan­ners and numer­ous sen­sors on the robots ensure that work­ing together in the same rack cor­ri­dor is safe for man and machine.

In the inbound process, the items to be stored are taken over by TORU from a shelf rack. In the out­bound process, the picked shoe­boxes are trans­ferred both in pick­ing carts, which are posi­tioned at the ends of the shelf rows, and in shelves next to the pack­ing stations.

What made the project spe­cial, was the out­break of the Corona pan­demic in spring 2020, which inter­rupted the inte­gra­tion of the robots into the ongo­ing oper­a­tion for sev­eral months. The suc­cess was even more remark­able when in August 2020 the inte­gra­tion of the robots was com­pleted in record time, despite numer­ous restric­tions due to the pan­demic, and all accep­tance cri­te­ria were met. The oper­a­tion of the robots was then com­pletely handed over to LLOYD employ­ees — since then, the robots have been work­ing autonomously on a daily basis and are sup­ported in rare excep­tional cases via remote sup­port from Munich or, if phys­i­cal inter­ven­tion is nec­es­sary, by a trained LLOYD employee.

With the use of the intel­li­gent robots, LLOYD is one of the inno­v­a­tive pio­neers in the indus­try. This is because the con­tin­u­ing growth in online trade and ever smaller batch sizes, even in sta­tion­ary retail, require automa­tion solu­tions that can be flex­i­bly adapted and scaled as required. Addi­tional TORU robots can be inte­grated into an exist­ing fleet in a few hours.