Black Friday, Cyber Monday and a busy season of Christmas shopping are just around the corner. It’s a time when e-commerce sales could be five to six times higher than usual, and we’re often asked how we deal with peak spikes in demand. Do we have a Santa’s workshop of hardworking elves? No, but we do have the next best thing….robot helpers.
During peak, hundreds of thousands of different products will arrive from popular consumer brands at our fulfilment centre. These must move like clockwork to ensure SKUs are in the right place at the right time. It’s an important first step to making sure shoppers’ orders are organised and dispatched on time. Our robot helpers are crucial to this.
We have two types of robots. A team of floor-based bots which carries products to and from our AutoStore (more on that in minute), while another team of bots picks products.
The robots work in tandem with a carefully managed system of conveyors, operatives, AutoStore and packaging lines to efficiently and effectively pick and pack products. We believe orders can be processed around 50% faster than traditional methods.
At Active Ants, automation is only part of the story — intelligence is what makes it powerful. Our proprietary system, Maya, is the brain behind our operations, continuously learning, predicting, and optimising every movement across our warehouses.
While AutoStore provides the physical automation, a compact cube shaped storage grid where products are stacked in bins, Maya makes it truly dynamic. Using machine learning and advanced data analysis, Maya interprets customer demand patterns, predicts which items will be needed next, and instructs the robots to position bins for the fastest possible retrieval.
The result is a constantly evolving fulfilment ecosystem where every decision is informed by data. Maya ensures the right products are always within reach, reducing travel time, improving accuracy, and delivering faster orders to customers, even during the busiest peak periods.
By blending automation with intelligence, Active Ants creates a seamless flow from storage to dispatch, where speed, precision, and adaptability come together to redefine fulfilment efficiency.
The many different parts of our fulfilment operation – robots, arrival of inbound SKUs, packaging lines, AutoStore, operatives and the dispatch of outbound orders – all need to work in harmony like an orchestra. A good conductor helps an orchestra to play to the right tempo, and our conductor is Maya – a proprietary Warehouse Management System (WMS) that synchronises operations to keep everything moving on time.
Maya harnesses the machine learning capabilities of AutoStore, the efficiency of our robots, the experience of our operatives and the speed of our packaging lines to enhance productivity and minimise bottlenecks. Maya makes Just In Time (JIT) a year-round reality, ensuring customer orders continue to be seamlessly fulfilled during peak.
Our in-house WMS easily integrates with webshops and provides customers with real-time insights into order processing, stock levels and sales data. This all contributes to enhanced visibility, further supporting speed and efficiency during busy peaks.
Are you ready to power peak productivity?
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