At NRI, we specialize in fulfilling premium apparel, footwear, accessories and select goods throughout North America. As we’ve grown over the years, we adopted autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in many of our facilities to supplement our workforce and scale further. We use AMRs from both 6 River Systems (now a part of Ocado Group) and Locus Robotics. 

Building custom integrations in-house to deploy a fleet of AMRs with our existing WMS, Aspire, comes with high costs, both in development and in ongoing maintenance. Our team recognized the value in a solution that could easily adapt and scale as the business needs changed.
 

SVT Robotics (SVT) utilized pre-built and reusable integrations of its SOFTBOT Platform to integrate both 6RS and Locus Robotics into NRI’s Aspire software WMS.  

“Our last rollout working with SVT was within weeks, versus the first robot rollout that we did ourselves, which took us over six months of writing to the API and writing out the different test scenarios, etc.,” says Sunny Bagri, NRI Vice President of Technology.
 

Efficiencies with staffing were another benefit for our team. “We went from needing multiple developers, down to one developer to help people through test scenarios versus actually writing code,” Bagri says. “From a business standpoint, it gets us to an ROI a lot quicker because you’re able to start using the solution a lot quicker.” 

With the AMRs integrated, everything changed for our warehouse teams. Before using the AMRs, our biggest challenge was keeping up with service level agreements SLAs. Now, with the AMRs in place, NRI’s associates can easily stay on top of same-day orders and better prioritize them. 

“We recognized right away that SVT approaches business the same way we do,” says Ryan Dale-Johnson, NRI Vice President of Business Development. “It was clear that we were talking to people who had done the job before and had done it well. We’re very confident in their resume.”  

SVT Robotics helped our teams improve multiple KPIs, including; 

• Accelerate integration and deployment from 6 months to 2 weeks. 

• Reduce downtime with monitoring and automated alerting. 

• Deploy multiple AMR solutions to support different business needs. 

The improvements in output also came with a boost in our team’s comfort, safety, and overall workplace satisfaction. With SVT’s help, our team sets and meets delivery goals, and presents attractive added value to clients. “Knowing in our head how improved the timeline is … allows us to be much more confident, and ideally, help win that business too,” says Dale-Johnson.