New materials handling technologies, like robotics, are a little like concept cars at the auto show. It is fun to dream, but most of us hesitate to buy one as the primary family auto. Similarly, systems integrators and distribution center managers are kicking the tires when it comes to materials handling robots; many, however, are waiting to see how the early adopters fare before driving one home.

Pittsburgh-based Giant Eagle is turning early adoption into a competitive advantage. One of the nation’s largest privately held multi-format fuel, food and pharmacy retailers, Giant Eagle is an early adopter of pallet-handling robotic industrial trucks (Seegrid, seegrid.com), a type of mobile robot that resembles an operator-less lift truck. The company began testing the idea of using the trucks for putaway operations in the fall of 2007. Since then, Giant Eagle has put into service four double robotic pallet trucks (vehicles that can handle two pallets at a time) in a 440,000-square-foot distribution center outside of Pittsburgh. Another four trucks are working at a retail support center, or RSC, as Giant Eagle refers to its DCs, in Cleveland.

The trucks are used to automatically move two inbound pallets at a time from the receiving area to drop-off locations serving the most distant locations in reserve storage. They move between 20% and 30% of the inbound receipts. In the Pittsburgh RSC, they complement other automated technologies, including an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) with 12,000 pallet locations serviced by three cranes and a voice-directed picking solution.
The result, says Joe Hurley, senior vice president of distribution and logistics, has been a reduction of manned travel for putaway and an increase in the productivity for the lift truck fleet.

“We have reduced manned travel for putaway by 20% to 30%, and we increased the high lift pallet per hour by 20%,” Hurley says. What’s more, robotic industrial trucks have freed lift truck operators up for more valuable processes, such as replenishment and picking. Finally, the vehicles are contributing to Giant Eagle’s competitiveness in a crowded marketplace. “New competitors enter our markets every day,” Hurley says. “We have to keep our warehouses efficient so we can take cost out of the system and reinvest those savings into the value proposition we offer to customers.”

The lessons learned from Giant Eagle’s pilot and deliberate implementation process can serve as a road map for any early adopter considering a new technology.

Exploring robotics
With nearly $10 billion in sales and 36,000 team members, Giant Eagle is ranked No. 29 on the Forbes list of the largest privately held companies. The company operates 229 supermarkets and 187 fuel and convenience stores in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland.

Continuous improvement and automation are part of the company’s distribution DNA. In addition to the AS/RS, a warehouse management system (WMS) and voice-directed picking system, the company uses labor standards to measure productivity. Thanks to that productivity data, Giant Eagle was acutely aware of the distance team members were traveling with conventional lift trucks: 500 miles a day, including 300 miles for putaway processes and 200 miles for replenishment processes. Since putaway is a non-value-added process, Giant Eagle has long been focused on reducing those miles.

“Using operators to move pallets from Point A to Point B, whether it was inbound or outbound, is an age-old problem in distribution,” says Hurley. “Because we measure labor, we know that the travel component accounts for a majority of our labor standard. We wanted to minimize the amount of human travel.”

Prior to robotic industrial trucks, wire-guided automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) moved a segment of pallets from receiving to reserve storage. However, since paths had to be cut into the concrete to guide the AGVs, the technology was not flexible enough for the seasonality of the products handled by a grocery chain. Flowers at Christmas are handled and stored in different locations than iced tea in the summer. In contrast, the robotic vehicles used by Giant Eagle are guided by a unique vision system that eliminates the need for wire-guided paths, tape or laser reflectors. The vehicles quickly and easily learn a new path to a new drop location when requirements change.

Giant Eagle received its first robotic truck in September 2007. Hurley says there were three objectives for the pilot test: safely incorporate a robot into a busy warehouse environment; effectively create an interface between the robot and Giant Eagle’s WMS to move the right pallets that would increase efficiency and minimize travel; and measure and improve operations.

“We were taking a leap on a new technology,” Hurley says. “But we knew we had to solve this old problem of travel time.”