Greenfield Plant Built Around 50 AMRs: 37% Throughput Gain, Vendor Reported

Building material flow on a blank site

A greenfield plant starts with a rare advantage and a rare risk. There is no legacy layout to work around, yet every routing decision made on paper will shape the floor for years. For a facility like this, internal material movement, the carrying of parts, components and finished work between receiving, storage, production and shipping, is often the hidden limit on output.

Manual transport carries a predictable cost. Forklift operators and material handlers spend shifts on repetitive runs, and the pace of those runs depends on people who get pulled away, slow down at peak or call in sick. Traffic between workstations also caps how tightly a line can be fed.

The operation in this study treated the fleet as part of the building rather than a later addition. Aisles, staging points and charging locations were designed around a fleet of 50 autonomous mobile robots from the start.

Designing the fleet into the new build

The facility was designed from the start around a fleet of 50 autonomous mobile robots, so the robots shaped the plan instead of adapting to it. Planning treated the material moves, the routes between them and the way the fleet would share space with people as one problem. Fleet size followed the flow of goods, not a headcount target.

Fleet sizing and route design depend on each other. A route that looks efficient on a drawing can jam when many robots share it at shift change, which is why charging, staging and traffic need to be considered together. That is the kind of planning a number like 50 demands before the first wall goes up.

• Map material flows from receiving through storage, line feed and shipping
• Define routes, staging points and charging locations before the building is fixed
• Size the fleet to the flows, then test traffic at peak volumes
• Train operators and maintenance staff alongside the fleet before go live
• Keep service and fault response in place after go live

What the reported figures show

The headline result is a 37% throughput gain. The figure is vendor reported, so it reflects the supplier's account of the deployment, not an independent measurement, and it should be read that way.

The same account reports a 14 month payback. Payback depends on what the deployment costs and what it displaces, so a reader weighing a similar project should rebuild that calculation with local volumes, labor costs and deployment figures.

Labor is the other reported outcome. According to the same vendor report, 32 of 36 forklift operators were redeployed to other roles. The repetitive moves went to robots, and people moved to work the building still needed.

Where a lease fits a fleet like this

Service Robot Co. is an OEM neutral commercial robot integrator for US businesses. We select robots across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service each unit through a nationwide network of US engineers, so one partner carries the whole lifecycle. A fleet built as a single plant plan is the same kind of work we bring to a site assessment.

Robots reach our customers through a lease. We offer a three year lease with one fixed lease payment quoted after a site assessment, so the cost is known before a fleet goes on the floor.

This study describes a greenfield build by a facility we do not name, not a Service Robot Co. deployment. The lessons about route design and fleet sizing apply to any plant weighing autonomous mobile robots for material handling.