Leading Dutch TV broadcaster visits Active Ants

How does the most technologically advanced e-fulfilment company in the world operate? That was the question that led leading Dutch tv broadcaster RTL 4 to our new warehouse in Roosendaal. In this special edition of EditieNL, that can be seen every day at 6 o’clock, our new and unique innovations got covered.

The e-fulfillment warehouse of the future

During the coverage, economist and eMarketing professor extraordinaire at the Erasmus University, Cor Molenaar stated that Active Ants, with its advanced state of mechanization and robotization, has built the warehouse of the future. No longer employees that have to walk for miles through shelves to complete orders. But a completely automized and efficient system to do the work for them.

Walking through endless hallways and picking orders is history

After seeing how our AutoStore robots effortlessly pick an ordered product, reporter Michiel Sampon experiences first-hand how our completely automated pack and sorting system makes his purchase ready for dispatch. And that within 5 minutes! In the end, only two employees were involved to complete the order and they didn’t have to walk for miles through the warehouse to do so, he says. Tasks like these will therefore be something of the past. “And luckily so, because it is not the most inspiring work”, replies Cor Molenaar on this statement. With this new system of picking, packing and sorting, work that is usually boring and repetitive will be replaced by more challenging activities, concludes the professor.  

Not 6, but only 1 football pitch.

“6 times less space needed than at a similar, but traditional distribution centre”. An important conclusion made by Michiel Sampon after Jeroen Dekker, one of Active Ants’ founders, gave him a tour of the facility. This use of space has been the subject of discussion in the Netherlands for years now. Every year new DC’s are popping-up and taking up more and more space in the Dutch landscape. This exponential growth in DC’s and pollution of space is seen as a big problem and Active Ants has found the perfect solution for it. Jeroen Dekker therefore believes that, in the future, every distribution centre will switch to these kind of systems. However, many years will pass before that happens. Fortunately Active Ants has already built this new e-fulfilment warehouse of the future. This way we can focus on the next big innovation to provide even better service to our partners.

Curious about the full coverage? Watch it here!

Source: EditieNL on Tuesday the 10th of November (https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/editienl/laatste-videos-editienl/video/5196168/robot-pakt-pakjes).