a North American decorative and functional hardware manufacturer shipping more than 2,000 same-day orders per shift
How a Decorative Hardware Distributor Doubled Pick Rates With Cart AMRs
A documented hardware distribution case study: same-day SLAs and 25% turnover gave way to cart AMRs that doubled pick rates and cut attrition to about 3%.
- 2x
- Pick rate gain
- 3%
- Turnover after
- 30 min
- New hire training
- 5/6
- Pick steps aided
Based on a documented real-world deployment. Figures are from public reporting; the organization is not named.
Same-day pressure on a manual pick floor
A North American decorative and functional hardware manufacturer ships decorative and functional home products to big-box retailers, mass merchants, and e-commerce accounts across the continent. Online demand spiked, and customer lead times shrank from 48 hours to 24 hours, then to same-day shipment on tight noon and 1 p.m. cutoffs.
The warehouse was still allocating and picking orders manually while turnover ran near 25%. Supervisors described shipping more than 2,000 orders in a single shift with cutoffs that left almost no slack. Keeping pace meant constant hiring, retraining, and overtime just to hold service levels.
- Manual order allocation and piece picking on a high-SKU catalog
- Same-day shipment windows with midday cutoffs
- Roughly 25% associate turnover slowing skill buildup
- Rising e-commerce volume without a matching automation plan
Cart AMRs on the piece-pick line
Leadership evaluated traditional sortation and goods-to-person systems but faced long implementation timelines and multimillion-dollar price tags. Collaborative cart autonomous mobile robots offered a faster path: sixteen units went live in January 2021 on the piece-pick operation.
The fleet was chosen to cover five of the six defined steps in the company's piece-pick process, not just transport carts at the end of a run. Associates followed optimized pick paths on the warehouse floor while the system handled allocation logic they had been doing by hand. Training for new hires dropped to about half an hour instead of a week or more because the robots guided the work.
- Benchmark automation options against same-day SLAs
- Deploy sixteen collaborative cart AMRs on piece pick
- Automate five of six internal pick-process steps
- Shorten onboarding with guided pick workflows
- Use operational data to tune paths and throughput
Measured gains on rate, retention, and training
Documented results from the deployment show pick rates doubled after the AMRs went live. Employee turnover fell from about 25% to about 3%, a shift leaders tied to steadier workflows and less walking on repetitive routes.
Training time for new picking associates fell to roughly thirty minutes. Supervisors also reported stronger visibility into throughput because the system surfaced performance data they had lacked under manual allocation.
What this pattern means for hardware distributors
Hardware and building-products distributors often hit the same wall: SKU breadth, volatile e-commerce spikes, and cutoffs that punish slow picks. Service Robot Co. stays vendor neutral, so you can match cart AMRs, tuggers, or other warehouse robot rental options to your aisle layout without locking into one OEM line.
We finance, deploy, integrate, train, and service units through a nationwide engineer network. Month-to-month robot rental or lease programs let you pilot one pick zone before peak season, and a free site assessment maps traffic before go live.