On 14th July 2021, the retail giant company Walmart announced its partnership with Massachusetts-based automation company Symbotic to bring robots to 25 distribution centers of Walmart.

If you ask any warehouse companies or retail companies what shortages they are facing, they will probably speak about labor shortages or shipping speeds and not about product shortages. Amazon is the top service provider for shipping products to its customers. Small retailers and giant retailers like Walmart face the worst crunch of Amazon’s dominance in the market.

Walmart and Symbotic have teamed up to face the competition. Both will be working together to bring robots to the distribution centers for speeding their deliveries and automate physically demanding work. This partnership is a continuation of their deal in 2017. In 2017, Symbotic’s autonomous robotics platform was brought to Walmart’s distribution centers in Brooksville, Florida, to increase freight sorting, stocking, and unloading.

Joe Metzger is Walmart’s executive vice president of supply chain operations. He says that the digital transformation happening now, with evolving customer habits, reshapes the retail industry.

Joe Metzger, in a statement, says,

“To serve customers now, and in the future, our business must provide the right tools and training to our associates so they can deliver the items our customers want, when they want them, with unmatched convenience. We’re investing in our supply chain at an unprecedented scale in order to optimize that process end-to-end.”

Over the past several years, Walmart has been active in the piloting of robots in an attempt to speed up specific procedures. However, its results have not been uniform to date. It was noticed in the case of Bossa Nova Robotics which is an inventory robotics maker. Walmart terminated its contract with the stock robots manufacturer; the start-up was thrown for a loop. It is, of course, what pilots are for, but it’s probably not the sting of the smaller enterprise.

However, the track record of Symbotic is substantially more robust. One of Walmart’s most significant competitors is listed among its associates: Target. And, while Walmart may explore the possibilities of acquiring its own start-ups (like Amazon, which based its robotic wing on the Kiva Systems acquisition), it seems like existing connections to be a significant obstacle to such a deal.

The supply chain of Walmart is central to ensure its customers can shop when, where, and however they choose. By integrating Symbotic’s robotic system, Walmart will improve its current supply chain facilities and digitize them to support growing customer demand and deliver a friction-free experience. In the meanwhile, Walmart will open its doors to future jobs and enhance efficiency and minimize costs for their staff.

In combination with proprietary software, Symbotic’s scalable and integrated solution implements a fleet of totally independent robot systems to achieve industry-leading performance and efficiency while boosting warehouse capacity. Thanks to the new robotic method, the time it takes to unload, sort, and stock freight in Walmart stores will be reduced.

The Robotic system from Symbotic uses a complicated algorithm in which cases like puzzle pieces can be saved using high-speed mobile bots, which work with the perfection that speeds input process and boosts freight accuracy for future orders. It also increases building capacity by using dense modular storage. And it makes unique pallets ready for storage and aisles by employing high-speed palletizing robotics to arrange and optimize freight.

This robotic integration is revolutionary! This first-of-the-kind technology is remarkable when used on a large scale since it makes things faster for the customers while saving the employees time. The new approach of unloading shop-friendly palletized trucks is going to make the procedure for associates faster and more straightforward, enabling them to spend more time with the customers.