Fetch Robotics (booth # 9011)

Summary of Innovation

Ensuring accurate inventory counts is a key concern for 3PLs, DCs, and retailers, which stand to lose over a trillion dollars due to poor inventory management practices that result in lost or misplaced items. Traditionally, warehouse managers have relied on physical counts conducted a few times per year—requiring hours of manual work and demand high labor costs—which often result in inaccurate data collection and failure to collect location-specific information. As a result, warehouse managers only see the number of items listed instead of their location throughout the warehouse, leading to inaccurate inventory levels, wasted man hours looking for inventory, and dollars lost in expedites, re-orders, and write-offs that disrupt operations during busy seasons.

To address these pain points, Fetch Robotics introduced powerful new radio-frequency identification (RFID) visualization capabilities for TagSurveyor that enable 3PLs, manufacturers and retailers to autonomously capture, and then analyze and visualize inventory data in the cloud. The TagSurveyor robot uses powerful RFID technology combined with robot positioning to geotag all items within their location in a facility. Now, TagSurveyor can create sophisticated visualizations of assets with their locations so that customers gain complete visibility of their assets by “seeing” inventory data on a facility map. With TagSurveyor, customers can increase the frequency of inventory counts and checks from once-a-month to multiple times per day and provide autonomous insights.

Innovation Statement

The TagSurveyor robot—which can be completely deployed in an hour in a mapped facility— uses RFID technology to provide customers with a comprehensive digital map of their assets overlayed on a map of their facility. Through TagSurveyor, customers can visually pinpoint assets that were supposed to be in a location that are no longer there, assets that are in a location that are not expected, or the movement of an asset from one location to another within a facility. This allows customers to improve inventory accuracy through autonomous and continuous cycle counts conducted multiple times a day, as opposed to manual counts conducted a few times a year that are disruptive, labor-intensive and error-prone.

Applicability

TagSurveyor provides 3PLs, manufacturers and retailers with a rapidly deployed, turnkey solution to autonomously and continuously capture, compute and visualize all of their inventory data on a facility map that can be deployed as-needed basis through a cloud-based Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) model.

 

Posted Date	12/20/19
Contact	Danny Pham
Contact Email	dpham[at]bateman-group.com
Category	Best Innovation of an Existing Product

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