A pair of Puma sneakers that ends up gift-wrapped under a tree this holiday season may pass through the proverbial hands of a robot moving merchandise at the brand’s distribution center in Los Angeles.
There are 171 zooming automatons helping 70-90 human workers pick and pack products at the brand’s 672,000-square-foot Torrance, Calif. facility each day. A creation of AutoStore, the robotic system operates within a gargantuan cage-like framework where lidded crates are stored 16 rows high, optimizing the use of a 50,000 square-foot space dedicated to storing and fulfilling Puma’s orders of sneakers, apparel and accessories.
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About 170,000 such crates are dedicated to Puma’s merch at the warehouse, and each one can store 66 pounds worth of product—say, six fleece zip-ups or shoeboxes each, give or take. To put the system’s impact into perspective, the building itself can hold about 5-6 million units of product, and 2-3 million can be stored in the 50-foot-tall AutoStore.
Human workers operate at stations surrounding the massive structure. Crates, pulled from throughout the towering stack, descend down an elevator shaft of sorts and appear before workers, who then pack them full of product and send them back up into the stack where they’re stored in optimal locations based on upcoming or in-process orders.
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