Statista reported more than a 20 percent rise of the average online spending in the Asia Pacific from 2019 to 2020. The rise in multiple marketplaces in Asia Pacific such as JD, Taobao, Lazada, Tokopedia and Shopee are testimony to this flourishing trend in retail and e-commerce.

With the evolution of retail emerged new opportunities in related industries, such as a growing pie of warehouses, distribution centers (DCs), and fulfilment centers (FCs), and in turn, these industries seeking productivity and automation capabilities.

For years, DCs and FCs were resistant to adopting robots in warehousing despite embracing many other technologies. Some of these companies were concerned about the perceived inflexibility, safety, investment burdens of adopting industrial robots into their workflow.

However, the coming of age of collaborative robotics alleviated the shortcomings of traditional industrial robots. Now, collaborative robots (cobots) are ideal for repetitive tasks in DCs and FCs that require high accuracy to reduce costly errors or returns, while freeing human workers to take care of other upstream and downstream processes.

When dealing with dull and repetitive tasks, human workers can become fatigued and lose their concentration. Unlike human workers, cobots are capable of automating operations around the clock and significantly reduce human errors. As such, cobots are best suited for many supply chain environments, such as "pick and place" processes, relieving the burden on the human workforce.

Unlike traditional industrial robots that required safety fencing and operating footprint, cobots can easily work alongside human workers with no safety fencing required (upon risk assessment). Cobots can also be easily deployed, programmed, and guided, to adapt to many repetitive tasks in the supply chain environment.

For instance, DCL Logistics, an omnichannel logistics company riding on the explosive growth and demands of e-commerce, sought a flexible automation solution that would integrate with the existing work cell arrangement and precisely handle the picking and packing processes in the center. In the past, five employees were required to manage a conventional manual picking process that could take an entire day to complete.

With the deployment of cobots, employees were re-deployed to more sophisticated tasks. Unlike traditional industrial robots that have a long payback period, the cobots achieved payback in as little as three months, prompting DCL Logistics to look forward to investing in more cobots as their operations expand. The company has managed to save more than 50 percent in labor costs and witnessed up to a 500 percent increase in productivity after the implementation of cobots.

In a recent market research report, Global Market Estimates (GME) highlighted a forecasted value of more than 40.5 percent compound annual growth rate in the Supply Chain Collaborative Robots Market from 2021 to 2026.

As the e-commerce sector continues to foster and consumer demands establishing new standards, cobots have presented an optimistic fringe for the retail industry. With the added value to human workers, top supply chain executives are aggressively ramping up collaborative automation in their facilities.

Distribution centers and fulfilment centers looking to adapt to accelerated market demands, would have to scale up their operations with automation, increasing the speed of order fulfilment, while retaining their talent pool in order to etch deep and stay relevant in the competitive market.

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The writer is regional director Asia-Pacific, Universal Robots.

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