How an Architectural Hardware Wholesaler Tripled Pick Rates With Cart AMRs

Walking ate the pick window

The wholesaler ships architectural hardware to contractors and dealers from several U.S. distribution centers. As volume grew, leaders saw pickers spending more time crossing the building than pulling small, high-mix lines.

A recently expanded Nevada center made the pain obvious. Manual piece picking could not keep pace with the new footprint, and supervisors were scheduling longer shifts just to clear the same order pool.

• High walking time between pick faces
• Piece picking on a wide SKU base
• New capacity online before labor caught up

Cart AMRs at the pick face

Operations brought in collaborative cart autonomous mobile robots that travel with pickers, carry totes, and queue work at the correct pick and deposit stations. The first rollout targeted the expanded Nevada site where walking was the clearest bottleneck.

After rates improved there, leadership deployed a larger fleet into a greenfield Missouri fulfillment center built for higher throughput. Training focused on how pickers release carts, confirm quantities, and let the system batch dense pick runs.

• Pilot cart AMRs on the expanded Nevada floor
• Measure pick rate against the prior manual baseline
• Scale fleet size into the new Missouri center
• Tune allocation rules using pick-density data

Measured pick gains

At the Nevada distribution center, documented results show pick rates 179 percent above the prior manual benchmark. That step proved the workflow before capital shifted to the larger build-out.

At the Missouri fulfillment center, the wholesaler reports pick rates tripled versus manual piece picking. Within two weeks of tuning how orders batch into each cart run, throughput rose another 16.5 percent without adding headcount.

Across three distribution centers the operation now runs thirty collaborative cart AMRs. Replenishment still has to keep pace, but pick starts later in the day yet finishes earlier because each run carries more lines.

What wholesalers can copy

This deployment is a documented industry example, not a Service Robot Co. customer story. It still shows what a vendor-neutral integrator must get right: match cart AMR capacity to aisle layout, phase training so pickers trust handoffs, and finance the fleet so a second site does not wait on a capital committee.

Service Robot Co. selects warehouse AMR platforms, runs site assessments, maps pick paths, and stays on call through a nationwide network of regional service engineers. Monthly robot rental or lease programs let you prove one building before you standardize cart AMRs across a multi-site network.