DHL Supply Chain is further accelerating the commercial deployment of its autonomous forklifts and pallet movers in its more than 1,500 warehouses worldwide, focusing on sites in labor-tight markets across Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland and North America.

The contract logistics arm of Deutsche Post DHL Group said the autonomous pallet movers can handle both horizontal and vertical movements of palletized goods, making them especially useful in sectors such as consumer, retail or automotive that are characterized by full-pallet handling.

It added that the deployment is part of DHL Supply Chain's Accelerated Digitalization agenda, a strategy for commercializing and scaling innovative solutions and new technologies.

Supporting the booming e-commerce sector

"Effective robotic support of our warehouse employees is not limited to the piece-picking processes at our booming e-commerce and fulfillment sites. Autonomous pallet movers can support service quality and operational excellence in many ways," said Markus Voss, Global CIO & COO at DHL Supply Chain.

He added that one of the main advantages of these indoor robotic transport devices is that they add immediate benefits to DHL Supply Chain operations and can theoretically be deployed in all of its pallet-handling operations.

"All told, our sites see millions of pallet movements every day. Not only do these processes require technical assets – forklifts or pallet movers, they also tie up substantial workforce capacity that we could deploy more effectively elsewhere, especially in labor-tight markets," Voss continued.

"We estimate that up to 30% of our global material-handling equipment fleet will use some form of robotic automation by 2030."

In its statement, DHL noted that the autonomous forklifts take over the picking, put-away and replenishment of full pallets in warehouses, reducing the number of manual pallet transfers without requiring significant changes in warehouse infrastructure.

Such forklifts can also easily reach DHL’s highest warehousing racks at heights of more than 10 meters and can handle all kinds of pallets, stillages and other unit load storage equipment.

"In their currently deployed configurations, the robotic units achieve 65% of human productivity and move 10 to 15 pallets per hour while safely maneuvering alongside warehouse employees and traditional material-handling equipment," DHL said.

"Such forms of hybrid work involving the collaboration of humans and robots can be especially helpful in markets seeing booming or highly volatile logistics activities, as well as in regions that are temporarily suffering shortages of qualified workers."

With 24/7 operation, DHL calculates that a fleet of just a dozen of these autonomous forklifts can handle more than a million pallets per year in just one facility.

DHL added that automated indoor robotic transport increases efficiency and improves workplace safety by taking over the repetitive task of driving pallets around.

It said that it will continue to expand the deployment of algorithms and artificial intelligence with access to big data which has "proven to be game changers in global supply chain planning."