The Robotic Solution to Fully Autonomous Supermarket Fulfillment
E-commerce has finally changed the Retail Marketplace forever. Up until now the Fulfillment Distribution Industry Model has simply replaced the billions of Retail Consumers with millions of Fulfillment Pay, Pick, Pack and Delivery laborers supporting an E-commerce platform. To date Automation of the Fulfillment process can at best be described as Labor Intensive. This paradigm is about to change dramatically.
The advent of e-commerce in the late nineties has completely changed the traditional nature of supermarket retail although the market place has been slow to adapt to the changing packaging requirements of E-commerce centric distribution model. The traditional supermarket retail model is defined as: by products manufacturer producing products in an industrial environment, packing and unitizing the products for distribution to a wide range of Distribution Centers that break down the uniform pallets of product and re-palletize the individual cases of product for redistribution to the retail outlets. Since companies like Amazon have only captured a very small percentage of the overall supermarket retail market product manufactures have not been required to make any changes to the traditional packaging and distribution techniques of the products. As a result the major portions of the products received by the On-Line Fulfillment centers are receiving their products in essentially the same
Packaging format as the traditional Retail Distribution Centers. In order to facilitate fully autonomous supermarket product fulfillment this paradigm must change. A Universal Fulfillment Pallet Configuration (UFPC) must be established for all Pallets that are to be shipped into Superfilment Autonomous Fulfillment Centers. The SKU manufacturer must ship single SKU Pallets in a UFPC as depicted here:
Superfilment Standard Pallet Configuration UFPC

Superfilment™ Center will not be able to accept the traditional stretch wrapped pallet filled with closed top cases as this pallet configuration is impossible to autonomously automate. Rather UFPC pallets will be configured with straps and open top cases to facilitate fully autonomous depalletization of each pallet SKU.
Traditional supermarket retail models have not effectively been transferred into the e-commerce environment. The modern e-commerce case packing operation due to the diversity of order sizes have been very difficult to automate due to the processing speed and diversity of customer orders. Up to now there has been no disruptive technology that could match the traditional supermarket retail packaging technology with the requirements of the e-commerce industry requirement for on-demand, random product unitizing and order collation, case packing of the order and delivery to the customer. Superfilment™ technology beginning with the manufacturer and ending on the consumer’s door step, changes this paradigm.