Scalable and Modular Goods-to-Person Technology
Introducing the NanoFC® X Series
As is often the case, automated fulfillment solutions are designed for a 5-year horizon. You struggle, sweat, and put your careers on the line to come up with an internal consensus and data to show what our business “will” look like 5 years after Go-Live. (Often forgotten is the “After Go-Live” part, meaning in reality, 6 to 7 years from project inception). If we take a look at most fulfillment automation plans, these automation projects need to pay back in <5 years to match the ROI you promised your board of directors, so let’s hope that your crystal ball was correct. Vince Lombardi stated not too long ago…”hope is not a strategy”, and it is not, especially when millions of your company’s dollars are on the line, with your name attached.
How many businesses do you know that changed exactly as planned over a 5–7-year period? I will venture to say…not many, if any! Throw in a Black Swan or two and your huge investment in a fulfillment monument may have been all for naught.
Introducing the NanoFC® X Series
The unique NanoFC® X Series comes in 5 different sizes, all geared to varying windows of available cube and performance, and all installing in ~1 week from the time it arrives on your dock, where we then roll it into place, and "snap” it into position…don’t like that position? Move the NanoFC® in days, not months.
You may know with a ~50% chance how your business will look in 5 years, but you should know within a 90+% chance what your business will look like in 1 year…so lets take a look at how to mitigate some risk shall we?
To get to a 5-year design horizon for fulfillment automation, you take your best educated guess at growth in several areas, including;
- Additional “Clients” (Retail stores, end-user’s, distributors, wholesalers, subscribers)
- Additional Orders
- Additional SKU’s (after you subtract the “dogs”)
- Additional sku categories that may have a different form factor than current sku’s
- Additional Lines/order
- Additional Units/line
- Additional Days on Hand Inventory requirements
Every one of these metrics requires an understanding of where you have been, and a crystal ball…. albeit an educated crystal ball, to decipher where you are going. A colleague once explained it like this: “Utilizing historical data to design your system is like driving while looking in the rearview mirror…dangerous, but better than being blindfolded”
At the C suite level, it is your job to mitigate risk and reduce that danger for your company. It is my job to present opportunities and options to aide in that quest.
Mitigating Risk by leveraging the NanoFC® X Series
Let’s say today you need a storage engine more than a performance engine based on 1 year out. So, you purchase the X7 (Accommodation for 2,706 totes, up to ~5,000 sku’s with divided totes, and a real-world performance of 226 lines/hr. with one FTE).
After ~9 months, you determine that you need to increase fulfillment performance, and yes, my sku base has grown. Do you purchase another X7? Maybe…but let us analyze the need…perhaps you need instead 2 X5’s (Each at 1,904 totes or 3,808 combined, ~7,500 sku’s with divided totes, and a real-world combined performance of 300+ lines/hr.…increase in sku availability & lines/hr. performance.)
So, do you need to purchase an X5? No! You only need to purchase an X3 at significantly reduced cost. Once delivered, and all within 1 week, we will relocate two storage modules from your X7 into the X3, creating 2 NanoFC® X5 machines…. ready to perform.
The combinations are endless, but each combination does one thing for you…eliminates the risk of purchasing a costly fulfillment monument that may or may not work for you in the future.
Please reach out with any questions or comments… we look forward to working hand in hand with you and your teams to reduce your fulfillment risk.
