The number and variety of products available to e-commerce consumers have expanded dramatically. With this change comes an increasing number of goods received by retailers and e-commerce operations in an ever-expanding variety of pallet load patterns. Even when a company receives multiple pallets of the same SKU, the SKUs can vary from pallet to pallet. The processes of breaking down these pallets and placing their contents into storage or a warehouse automation system are common operational bottlenecks.

Until recently, flexible depalletizing has been particularly challenging for warehouse robots to handle. While humans can easily deal with unstructured and ever-changing tasks like unloading a random assortment of items, robotic programming has taken a while to catch up. However, major improvements in three key technologies are overcoming traditional challenges:

1. Advances in vision and perception
2. Development of sophisticated machine learning
3. Innovation in gripping technology

Together, these breakthroughs are driving fully automated solutions capable of meeting or exceeding the throughput of manual depalletizing operations. Download the white paper for a highlight of the significant benefits these smart flexible depalletizers have to offer modern distribution centers (DCs) and other fulfillment operations and explore the increasingly attractive business case for implementing these solutions.