The next wave of growth for Robots in Warehouse

Desired outcome

Mobile robots are increasingly common in huge warehousing companies with large IT teams and in areas that have a high labor cost however they are not common in mid-sized warehouse companies or those in middle income countries. Ubiquity Robotics has developed a robot that is lower cost and much easier to deploy than the current robot types - and we would expect to target this in mid-sized warehouses that don't have huge IT teams, and middle income countries where the lower labor cost means the robot needs to be less expensive to generate positive ROI. How do we reach that large, and fragmented customer base effectively. How should we market to that customer group?

Initial Problem Description

Ultimately we would like to be the major supplier of picking conveyance robots to the middle bracket warehouses where this is needed but under-penetrated.
Currently, we have a product that is qualified, tested and ready to go, but current marketing methods are not delivering quickly enough.
The desired state is that we have predictable revenue coming from these warehouse operators in terms of robot sales.
How do we market and penetrate this market?

Context

With the rise in E-commerce, fulfillment warehouses have grown faster than the rest of the economy. Meanwhile, labor cost increases and a decreasing interest in working manual labor jobs has meant that it's become more difficult to recruit people to work in those warehouse jobs. 80% of hiring managers have had difficulty in recruiting post-pandemic. Most of the work in warehouses is material movement - often being 85% or more of the activity. Mobile robots are well positioned to take on that activity and there has been dramatic growth of robot usage in the largest warehouses. However, robots remain under-penetrated while 78% of warehouse operators say lack of automation is their number one problem only 18% have invested in automation solutions.

Nowhere is this under-penetration so significant as in the mid-range warehouse operators. While large warehouse operators like Amazon and GXO have specalist teams that just work on robot implementations, the smaller, more traditional operators struggle. Often they have hard working, non-technical operators, often they are family owned businesses - they all know they must automate, but are completely unfamiliar with how to go about it.

Ubiquity Robotics has developed a warehouse conveyance product that seeks to target this audience. This product avoids many of the most complex aspects of the warehouse robot problem. Rather than needing a cloud based dispatch system with necessary interfaces with a warehouse management system (WMS) and its associated systems integration and WiFi infrastructure costs - the robot is capable of sensing other robots in the robot swarm and engaging in route deconfliction in an entirely peer to peer way. The robot is able to be programmed just by placing stickers on the floor - rather than having complex robot planning systems. Overall the system is designed to support the idea that we can dispatch a robot to the user and they can set it up themselves with little effort rathing than requiring a huge IT team, expensive infrastructure and other activity.

However, this customer group, while untouched, is highly fragmented. There are thousands of small operators each of which needs this solution but the numbers make it difficult to reach them.

How do we market to this group of customers and achieve effective sales?

Connection to cross-cutting areas

These robots are used in warehouses, and in factories to move goods around. They are a prime example of Industry 4.0 and digitalisation in action. Their deployment help warehouses and factories become significantly more efficient while removing drudgery from the lives of warehouse workers - while at the same time closing the gap between the number of people needed for these jobs and the number of people available. They are an electric vehicle that displaces gas powered forklifts in warehouses so there is some connection to sustainability topics.

Input

We have white papers, installation examples and numerous customer interactions, we also have extensive collateral material, distributors and other information. We've achieved success in marketing robots through other channels, and to other customer groups, we have marquee customers (e.g. Microsoft) - but we don't have a clear path forward on this customer group.

Expectations

I would expect
1) A document that describes the broad outlines of the strategy, the rationale and the data that backs up your point of view. The thinking in this document is much more important than the format of the document itself, but I would suggest either a powerpoint document, a linear text or an A3 style document. If the thinking is good I don't care what the document looks like - a hand drawn document with good thinking is better than a flashy presentation with poor reasoning. The founder of Ubiquity is a former McKinsey consultant - so will tend to drive the team to engage in quality thinking.
2) A detailed plan that includes who, what whens that is executable and realizable.
3) Ideally some initial test data of you actually trying to do some elements of this.

Critical thing would be an innovative and practical marketing strategy that is bootstrappable e.g. we can start with something small and use it as a basis to expand

Desired Team Profile

Ideally the team would contain
1) Someone with a strong marketing background
2) Someone with at least some actually commercial sales experience
3) Someone who has at least played with robots a little bit and understands a little bit about how they operate

Obviously a single person could have more than one of the above characteristics simultaneously.

Additional Information

The founder of Ubiquity Robotics is a former McKinsey consultant - he will guide this project. The competitive landscape is broad and covered by a number of companies. The ones we think most about are Locus and Fetch. Additionally there are a large number of smaller players who have developed some kind of robot solution.

Related Keywords

• Automation, Robotics Control Systems
• Process control and logistics
• Process automation
• Logistics
• Manufacturing
• Industry
• Digitalization
• Automation, Telepresence & Robotics
• Robotics
• warehouse