a national office supplies retailer operating a large fulfillment center near Toronto
How a National Office Retailer Cut Daily Fulfillment Shifts From 13 Hours to Eight With AMRs
Office-supplies fulfillment AMRs cut daily operations from 13 hours to eight at a large Canadian DC, nearly doubling pick rates and lifting order quality 73%.
- 13→8 hr
- daily ops
- ~2x UPH
- pick speed
- 73%
- quality gain
- 70%
- less training
Based on a documented real-world deployment. Figures are from public reporting; the organization is not named.
A conveyor at the end of its life
A national office supplies retailer ran a major fulfillment center near Toronto on a conveyor system that was nearly three decades old. The line was noisy, congested, and expensive to maintain while the team chased a next-day delivery promise through peak seasons like back-to-school.
Associates faced long travel paths, quality control bottlenecks, and physical strain on every shift. Leadership needed automation that could deploy without tearing out the building or pausing customer shipments.
- Aging conveyor drove downtime and maintenance cost
- Peak seasons stretched shifts and overtime
- Manual picking limited units per hour and accuracy
AMRs over the existing floor
The retailer partnered with an autonomous mobile robot supplier to replace conveyor-centric workflows with zone-based picking on the current layout. Robots met associates at pick faces so people traveled less and touched fewer heavy carts.
Rollout emphasized speed and calm operations. A second site go-live was described internally as a non-event, with teams reaching full productivity within about two weeks and scaling robot counts during peak without infrastructure changes.
- Map fast movers for robot-accessible pick zones
- Train associates on tablets with multilingual prompts
- Phase robots in while orders continued shipping
- Add units seasonally without reworking conveyors
Five hours back on the clock
Documented outcomes include nearly doubling units per hour with autonomous mobile robots and cutting daily operations from 13 hours to eight on the measured workflow. Order quality rose about 73 percent while errors fell from nine per thousand orders to about three, with stretches at zero.
Training time dropped about 70 percent and overtime pressure eased as throughput rose. After one month of operation the site was tracking ahead of its return plan while associates reported quieter, cooler, and less strenuous work.
What this means for your DC
Retail and wholesale fulfillment teams do not always need a greenfield building to gain AMR benefits. Warehouse robot rental or lease paths let you prove zone picking on one shift before you retire legacy conveyors.
Service Robot Co. stays vendor neutral, matches autonomous mobile robots to your slotting and WMS hooks, and handles finance, deployment, training, and nationwide service as one partner. You shorten shifts when robots absorb travel, not when you simply ask people to walk faster.