How a European Shower-Enclosure Maker Replaced 20 km of Daily Walking With AGVs

Workers Were the Plant's Internal Conveyor

A European shower-enclosure manufacturer runs a production floor where components must leave an automated warehouse and reach pre-assembly and assembly cells on a steady rhythm. Each individual move looked small. Added together across a shift, they became a daily walking load that wore on people and pulled them away from the work they were hired to do.

The plant's process manager put the scale in plain terms: "Before the introduction of AGVs in our production, our employees walked 20 km a day." That distance was the labor the plant wanted back on the floor.

Walking routes of that length are tiring, and material that depends on people moving it arrives when people are free, not when the line needs it.

• Components moved from automated warehouse storage to pre-assembly and assembly cells
• Employees covering about 20 km of plant floor each day on internal transport

Eleven AGVs Navigating by the Building Itself

The plant deployed a fleet of 11 AGVs from the robot supplier. Rather than laying magnetic strips into the floor, the vehicles use natural feature navigation, relying on their built-in safety laser and fixed points around the plant. For a site where layout and traffic keep shifting, that removes a fixed guidance layer that would need rebuilding every time a route changed.

A fleet manager running on an ANT server links the vehicles to the plant's internal ERP and WMS, so transport follows what production and warehousing actually need. The vehicles can change direction at will, and bay entries are reached with very few centimeters of tolerance, a precision that visitors noticed.

• Route parts from the automated warehouse to pre-assembly and assembly cells
• Navigate on the vehicles' built-in safety laser and fixed plant points, with no floor magnets
• Connect the fleet manager to the plant's ERP and WMS so dispatch follows real demand
• Return staff time from walking to higher value work

Walking Time Returned to the Plant Floor

The headline result is the roughly 20 km of daily walking that the AGVs now handle. That figure is the plant's own account, and it is the number this study is built around.

Beyond distance, the plant reports that freed staff moved on to higher value work, and that the vehicles brought direction changes and bay precision to the floor. Those are the qualities that make transport automation useful beyond a single metric.

A team weighing a similar move should read 20 km as one plant's outcome, not a forecast for another floor. The transferable lesson is the method: measure the walking first, then match the vehicles and routes to what the floor actually does.

What an Integrator Adds to a Project Like This

A plant needs more than vehicles to get this result: routes planned around real flows, navigation that suits the building, a fleet manager tied into ERP and WMS, and staff who know how the fleet behaves when a vehicle pauses. Service Robot Co. is a vendor neutral robot integrator for US businesses, so that work starts with the robot that fits the floor rather than a single manufacturer's catalog.

We select robots across manufacturers, then offer them on a 3-year lease with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. We deploy, integrate, train, and service each unit through a nationwide US engineer network, so a plant works with one partner and one number for the whole lifecycle.

Industry leasing contracts are typically fixed term, often three to five years, and maintenance is frequently billed separately. A three-year lease with one payment and one service contact is a different package to compare line by line against those norms.