Finding the Right Picking Solution to Boost Your Fulfillment Throughput
Lessons from ProMat 2025: How Modern Warehouse Picking Technologies Coordinate Robots and People to Eliminate Downtime and Achieve 2-3x Throughput Improvements
In today’s fast-paced logistics and e-commerce environment, businesses are under constant pressure to improve efficiency and meet growing customer demands. One of the most significant challenges facing companies is optimizing the picking process. This critical stage of the fulfillment cycle—picking items from inventory and packing them for shipment—can often become a bottleneck, slowing down order fulfillment and increasing operational costs.
In this first blog of our three-part series, we’ll explore why increasing pick throughput is so important and how Onward Robotics is helping businesses achieve 2-3x improvements in throughput with Meet Me® automation.
The Growing Challenge of Picking Throughput
In the fast-paced world of modern logistics, speed is everything. As e-commerce grows and customers expect quicker deliveries, businesses are constantly looking for ways to streamline their operations. One of the key bottlenecks in the fulfillment process is the picking stage.
The pick process involves selecting items from inventory (picking) and preparing them for shipment (packing). This stage can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to errors, especially in high-volume environments. As companies scale their operations to meet demand, the need for increased throughput becomes evident. Many companies are turning to automation solutions to improve the efficiency of their picking processes, but it’s not always easy to know where to start.
The Benefits of Increased Picking Throughput
By adopting advanced automation solutions, businesses can unlock a variety of powerful benefits that drive operational efficiency and productivity. These cutting-edge technologies work together seamlessly to streamline processes, enhance accuracy, and improve overall performance in the warehouse.
Here are just a few of the key advantages businesses can expect from implementing automation for picking:
Faster Order Fulfillment
By utilizing automation for time-consuming tasks like picking and businesses can significantly reduce the time it takes to process and fulfill orders. This allows employees to focus on higher-value tasks, such as quality checks, leading to faster shipment times and improved customer satisfaction.
Higher Accuracy
Automated systems are designed to minimize human error, ensuring that the right items are picked with greater precision. This enhanced accuracy not only reduces costly mistakes but also improves inventory management, helping businesses maintain trust with customers and reduce returns.
Improved Labor Efficiency
Automation of repetitive tasks, such as order picking, decreases the need for manual labor, allowing employees to be reassigned to more strategic roles that add value to the business. This shift in labor utilization not only boosts productivity but also helps improve employee job satisfaction by reducing monotonous tasks.
Scalable Growth
As order volumes rise, automation solutions can be scaled to meet demand without the need for significant infrastructure changes. These systems are designed to grow with the business, ensuring consistent performance and maintaining efficiency even during peak seasons, such as holidays or sales events, without sacrificing speed or quality.
What to Look for in an Automated Picking Solution
We understand the challenges of increasing throughput while maintaining accuracy and reducing operational costs. That’s why we’ve developed Lumabot powered by Pyxis—a cutting-edge solution designed to accelerate the pick process. Here’s how Lumabot can help companies achieve 2-3x improvements in throughput:
1. Enhanced Mobility for Speedier Operations
Lumabot is a highly versatile person-to-goods autonomous mobile robot (AMR) that can navigate complex warehouse environments with ease. Lumabot reduces the need for manual labor to move goods, allowing workers to move onto the next pick and focus on high-value tasks. This mobility enables a significant increase in the overall speed of the picking process.
2. Smart Integration with Existing Systems
Lumabot integrates effortlessly with your existing warehouse management system (WMS), requiring minimal setup. The system updates the WMS in real-time with every transaction, ensuring that your operations stay current.
What’s more, the WMS hands off the execution of picking to Lumabot, allowing us to take over and optimize everything—from determining what to work on, when to work on it, and how to pick. This smart integration not only reduces bottlenecks but also enhances throughput, ensuring accuracy and eliminating costly errors that often arise from manual handling. By leveraging real-time data, we optimize pick paths and tailor our approach to meet the specific needs of your business.
3. Scalability and Flexibility
Whether your operation is small and looking to grow or already a large, complex warehouse, Lumabot can scale to meet your needs. This flexibility means that you can increase throughput without needing to completely overhaul your current processes—or your facility. With an infrastructure-free design, Lumabot AMRs fit into your existing space, making automation easier and more cost-effective than ever.
Warehouses can achieve 2-3x improvements in throughput without the headaches of major infrastructure investments. The future of picking is here—efficient, scalable, and ready to deploy.
The Power of Pyxis: Bringing It All Together
One of the standout concepts we discussed at ProMat 2025 was the need for holistic automation solutions that work together seamlessly. That’s where Meet Me automation comes in. This innovative system coordinates the interactions between robots, workers, and existing systems, creating a truly integrated solution for improved picking throughput.
With Meet Me automation, Lumabots can be deployed alongside other robots, sortation systems, and automated equipment to create a comprehensive solution for order fulfillment. By optimizing workflows and reducing the time spent on manual handling, Meet Me enhances the overall efficiency of your warehouse.
Looking Ahead: What’s Next for Picking Automation?
As businesses continue to adapt to the changing landscape of e-commerce and logistics, it’s clear that automation will play a pivotal role in meeting demand and maintaining competitiveness. The insights we gathered at ProMat 2025 reaffirmed that increasing pick throughput is a top priority for companies across industries.
With innovative solutions like Lumabot powered by Pyxis and Meet Me automation, Onward Robotics is at the forefront of this transformation, helping companies achieve the speed and efficiency they need to stay ahead.
Stay tuned for the next blog in our series, where we’ll explore another major trend from ProMat 2025: The Road to Faster Fulfillment with Lumabot
