Automation and robotics set the scene: The future of e-fulfilment according to Active Ants

“If you can predict what will happen in ten or twenty years, then you also know what to do today.”

Those words are spoken by Jeroen Dekker, co-founder and director of Dutch logistics service provider Active Ants. He is not a futurologist. Nor is he a professional trend watcher. However, in no way did this prevent Jeroen Dekker from sharing his vision of the future of e-fulfilment with us during the most recent edition of Supply Chain Innovations and from identifying possible market trends.

As one of the pioneers in the world of e-commerce and Internet logistics, the Dutch serial entrepreneur has also gained the necessary credit and credibility to do so with conviction. Jeroen Dekker took his first steps in e-commerce in the mid-1990s, when the logistics of doing business over the Internet were only in the very early stages. In 1996, he was the first employee of Shop.nl, one of the first web shops in the Netherlands and, if we are to believe him, even the very first web shop.

“It was a time when we still packed and shipped the orders ourselves”, he recalls. Since then, the entrepreneur has founded five e-commerce companies.

After becoming director and shareholder at Shop.nl in the late 1990s, Jeroen Dekker started his own chain of web shops in food supplements, which he successfully sold after some time. Meanwhile, he also set up several companies in the Netherlands, Belgium and Nepal that were active in web shop development and graphic design.

Jeroen Dekker, managing partner of Active Ants: “If the predicted doubling of the global parcel volume by 2026 actually takes place, it will put even more pressure on logistics networks, on roads, on warehouses, on companies like ours, but also and especially on people.”

Focus on e-fulfilment

Jeroen Dekker and a partner took over fulfilment company Alpak Shopservices in 2011. In 2014, they decided to rename their new business to Active Ants: a name that better covered its commercial meaning. After all, following the takeover, the service provision was further expanded. For example, from now on it also included support in building websites and online marketing activities. But even more important was the renewal of the focus. After both partners had discovered the huge logistic challenges web shop owners were facing, they completely shifted their focus to e-commerce logistics or e-fulfilment. Today, Active Ants takes care of the whole logistic process of web shops, from receiving and storing the products to packing and shipping them to the end consumer.

Intelligent Ants

"We process about one million packages for more than fifty different web shops, which have hundreds of thousands of items in stock, with over fifty employees," as Jeroen Dekker explained the name change in 2014. "By analogy with the ants, we have also found an intelligent way to manage that properly."

Over the past decade, Active Ants has grown into one of the larger e-fulfilment players in this part of Europe, with more than 250 customers and 5 million orders processed per year. Today, the company has 500 employees and, in addition to the Netherlands (Roosendaal), where its headquarters are still located (Nieuwegein), it is also active in Belgium (Willebroek) and Germany (Dorsten). Meanwhile, Active Ants also has England in its sights, with the opening of a fifth e-fulfilment centre in Northampton in September.

International Growth

Since 2018, Active Ants may be 75 percent owned by Bpost, the Belgian postal company, but co-founder Jeroen Dekker has remained on board as a director all this time. He is now primarily responsible for innovation and internationalisation. These factors were ultimately the main reasons for entering into a partnership with a strategic investor such as Bpost: in order to continue to grow, particularly internationally, and to continue to invest in innovations. “The knowledge, the network and the financial strength of Bpost enable us to continue to grow strongly in cross-border e-fulfilment, while maintaining good quality”, Jeroen Dekker believes. According to him, this further growth, also internationally, will come anyway. To support this statement, he cites research by Pitney Bowes, an American specialist in e-commerce logistics. The Parcel Shipping Index published last year, for which the company relies on data from thirteen important markets for e-commerce, shows that the global parcel volume in 2020 has already passed the 131 billion mark. (In 2014, the volume was only 43 billion shipments.) That equates to 4,260 parcels sent per second: an increase of no less than 27 % on an annual basis.

Logistic Capability

However, that same Index does not only look backwards, but also ahead. The most likely prognosis is that the global parcel volume will double again between 2020 and 2026, from 131 to 266 billion shipments. Facilitating this expected growth explosion, and especially providing the best possible logistical support, will remain the most important challenge for the e-commerce sector in the years to come. And that is exactly the mission Active Ants has set for itself.

In fact, Active Ants was set up with the vision that e-fulfilment can be much more accurate and efficient, as long as you invest in innovation and make the necessary investments in advanced automation and robotisation. It seems that this is the only sustainable way for both people and society to keep up with the steep growth of e-commerce in logistics, according to Jeroen Dekker.

The most striking of the four AutoStore systems that Active Ants had installed, in the Dutch branch in Roosendaal, can automatically process up to 200,000 storage bins.

AutoStore at the core of the business

In recent years, Active Ants has put its money where its mouth is. The company invested in four of the most modern e-fulfilment centres. A fully automated AutoStore warehouse system is central to each centre. By stacking plastic bins on top of and next to each other in such a cube-shaped framework, Active Ants can do with 600% less storage space than in a traditional warehouse with racking. The most impressive of the four installed AutoStore systems, in Roosendaal, the Netherlands, is capable of handling up to 200,000 such bins fully automatically. The AutoStore systems are also built to be easily scalable. On top of each AutoStore cube is a framework of rails, on which robots ride. Using intelligent software, they know exactly which bins to bring to the picking stations. There, the order pickers, in turn, use visual instructions based on pick-to-light technology to pick the required items from the bins. Once an order is complete, they send it to the packing tables and finally on to dispatch.

Optimising warehouse design

The use of robots, including autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), means that both the storage process and order picking at Active Ants are now faultless, fast, dust-free, theft-preventative and cheap.

The combination of extensive automation and the use of robots, including autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), means that both the storage process and order picking at Active Ants are now faultless, fast, dust-free, theft-preventative and cheap. The continuous optimalisation of the warehouse design pays off, that much is clear.

Active Ants also likes to be advised by external experts on this optimalisation. Dutch logistics consultancy firm Groenewout was asked to provide the necessary support for the conceptual design choices and supplier selection of the e-fulfilment centre in Roosendaal. This led, among other things, to the choice of an AMR solution for the transport of the shipping boxes, which allows Active Ants to reduce the number of conveyor belts to a minimum. Groenewout's expertise also came in handy in the implementation of automatic packaging and sorting machines and a system for customised packaging printing.

The Future is Automated

During Supply Chain Innovations 2022 in Antwerp, Jeroen Dekker listed a number of trends that he believes will determine the future of e-fulfilment to a greater or lesser extent. If there was a common thread in that list, it was the strategic importance of automation and the absolute necessity to continue investing in innovation.

As the most important reason for this, Jeroen Dekker cites the continuing growth of e-commerce. “If the predicted doubling of the global volume of parcels by 2026 actually takes place, it will put even more pressure on logistics networks, on roads, on warehouses, on companies like ours, but also and especially on people. There is an enormous amount of work to be done, but a critical shortage of people to do it. We even have to start hiring people from elsewhere to do all that work”, he laments.

Towards a Sustainable Alternative

"Precisely because the human factor is the most valuable, you see that within traditional logistics, the pressure on people increases in order to achieve certain KPIs and save time or costs. This results in an unsustainable way of working and we don't want that. That is why I believe in a future that is mainly automated. Not only can we no longer find the people to do all the work, the work itself is just too hard and monotonous for most people." For all these reasons, Active Ants believes it is important that they can automate that heavy and repetitive work or have it done by robots. “In an ideal scenario, you might think that people wouldn't even be involved. But people are still very important - and will continue to be”, Jeroen Dekker concludes. "Also in the warehouse, for example, for receiving goods and processing returns: the typical processes that are quite difficult to automate and robotise."