NEW YORK -- "Mick Mountz runs a company that sets hundreds of robots loose in warehouses."
So says Wired magazine senior editor Jason Tanz to start a session with the CEO of Kiva systems, a company that uses a form of artificial intelligence technology to create distribution warehouses for customers like Walgreens and Staples.
'For our purposes, it’s just freaking cool.'So instead of using people to pull things out of an enormous warehouse, one by one, Mountz uses hundreds of robots that zoom around. And of course, they are far more efficient.
And that's not even the best part. “For our purposes,” says Tanz, “it’s just freaking cool.”
What the Kiva warehouses have done is convert a classically serial process (boxes snaking along a sequential route) to a “massive parallel processing engine” to move the inventory simultaneously through a building and bring it right to a human worker, says Mountz.
So without "leaving her little orange mat," a worker is just handed an item from her very own bot (it looks like a pretty cushy job in this video), scans it and packs into one of the customer containers. “She can do three times as many orders per hour as she could do the old way,” says Mountz.
How smart are the 'bots?
“The robots show up at the pace workers consume them,” says Mountz. Translation: Fast workers are dumped with more work, because they can handle it. And it’s the robots who decide that.
So unlike the I Love Lucy episode with the speedy candy-conveyor belt, workers don’t have to stuff anything down their shirts to keep up.
Under the hood of the operation, the robot technology also helps organize the warehouse products, by tracking their popularity. "If these were the days leading up to Valentine's Day," says Mountz, “the red heart candies would be scooting to the front of the building."
The day after, all the chocolate will drift to the back of the warehouse, where it’s out of the way. Through this "dynamic and adaptive," algorithm, the inventory actually sorts itself out.
Using Kiva Systems "is kinda like using a Macintosh," says Mountz. They have the "power to crush" the other kids with their intelligent robot-weapons. It’s disruptive because Kiva’s customers are changing the game by filling out real-time orders and creating a next-day delivery phenomenon.
Another feature of the system that customers can use is taking advantage of the "long tail" as a selling strategy on the Web. The difference between a web CD store and a brick-and-mortar one is that the former can hold three million records, compared to about ten thousand tangible ones. "With Kiva you can add a long tail, without disrupting the productivity of the building," says Mountz.
All in all, the 'bots are doing a pretty good job of running huge production warehouses and making life a lot easier for their human counterparts.
As Mountz says, "All Kiva pickworkers are happy pickworkers."
Full Coverage: Wired Business Conference: Disruptive By Design | 2011
