A Leading Pet E-commerce Company’s Ergonomic Revolution in Warehouse Ops
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Solving for Rate and Ergonomic Risk
A major e-commerce retailer, known for its focus on pet products, faced significant challenges as it scaled its warehouse operations—particularly the physical strain on employees handling heavy items. To address these concerns, the company implemented an advanced robotic depalletizing system powered by Plus One Robotics’ AI vision technology and human-in-the-loop supervision.
By deploying robots to manage high-risk, repetitive tasks, the retailer reduced ergonomic strain while achieving measurable gains in throughput and process efficiency. The result: improved productivity, fewer workplace injuries, and greater employee satisfaction across its fulfillment network.
At-A-Glance
Key Challenges
- Increased injury claims due to ergonomic challenges
- Inconsistent and sub-par throughput rate
- Damaged product on the warehouse floor
Business Impact
- Inability to scale manual operations to meet growing demand
- Decline in employee satisfaction
Value Achieved
- Eliminated ergonomic risk for heavy tasks
- Deployed streamlined mixed-SKU solution with multiple pick stations to operate in highly variable state
- Implemented Yonder to decrease human intervention on the warehouse floor
Technology
- PickOne
- Yonder
“Partnering with Plus One Robotics allowed us to leverage advanced AI vision to improve efficiency, accuracy, and safety.”
— Director of Automation Engineering, Project Partner
Overview
As a leading e-commerce player in the pet supplies market, this retailer’s rapid growth led to increasing complexity in warehouse operations. Handling heavy items—often bags exceeding 40 pounds—created ongoing challenges for worker safety, efficiency, and retention.
The company sought a scalable automation solution that could alleviate physical strain without disrupting throughput targets or compromising operational flexibility.
Introducing the Robotic Depalletizing Solution
The retailer implemented a turnkey robotic depalletizing system engineered to handle high-weight SKUs in the pack-out process. Plus One Robotics’ PickOne™ vision software and Yonder™ human-in-the-loop support were deployed to enable real-time exception handling and adaptive performance across variable loads.
The benefits were quickly realized:
- Consistent throughput goals achieved for heavy and bulky items
- Automated pack-out process reaching up to 98% efficiency, with minimal human intervention
- Expedited exception handling via Yonder, reducing downtime and manual recovery
- Continuous learning and adaptation, improving edge-case handling over time
The successful deployment underscored the customer’s commitment to innovation and operational excellence in addressing workforce health and safety.
Continuous Evolution
With the support of Plus One’s AI-driven vision and exception-handling system, performance data from Yonder continues to refine the automation model. The retailer has since scaled this approach across multiple facilities, deploying additional systems to support a wider range of SKUs, pallet types, and packaging configurations—setting a new standard for ergonomic efficiency and scalable automation in fulfillment.