HYDRA
Walmart WMS
Significant increase in the number of fulfillment
centers are anticipated in the coming years to
keep pace with the rapidly-growing Walmart U.S.
eCommerce. The vision is to enable these new
centers with next-gen technology to reduce operational costs and provide a better experience for our customers .
Some of the project's KPIs
VARIABLE COST
PER UNIT
The aggregated costs of processing an item
CYCLE
TIME
Time it takes to process an item
CUBE
UTILIZATION
Cubic space that is filled with a inventory
THROUGHPUT
CAPACITY
Number of items that can be processed
Users
PICKERS
Pick items and put them into boxes
PACKERS
Prepare fragile items and pack orders for shipping
PROBLEM SOLVERS
Solve different types of issues within the FC
MANAGERS
Manage operations inside the FC
This project consists of designing a Pilot building to prove the benefits of automation. The design team partnered with product managers, operation managers, and engineers to design the process and tools that will run the facility. Most of the interfaces are kiosk-like UIs that users operate to perform various tasks at different work stations.
Here are some of the outbound workstations on the pilot building:
Each of these stations presents unique design challenges that the team untangles through research, prototyping, and user testing.
Let's take a closer look at one of these stations.
Pick station
Here the operator has to pick items from totes and place them on boxes.
In this case, the interface needs to tell the user what to pick from one of the two totes on the upper part of the station and on which of the four containers at the bottom to place it.
Is important to understand that this station is packed with technology. There are two over-head scanners that scan item's barcodes as the user picks them from the totes. Greenlight indicators tell the user where to place the last scanned item. Four motion sensors detect if the last scanned item is being placed in the wrong container.
With all this technology, the interface plays a supportive role in the operation, reinforcing the visual clues on the station and providing issue-reporting functionalities for when errors occur.
Research shows that most of the users were less prone to make errors when the interface resembles the workstation and only shows one task at a time.
Here we can see the station in action when the project was presented to Walmart's CEO and other executives.
This is just a sneak peek at one of the many different types of workstations designed for this project.
The Pilot building was a huge success and now we are changing our focus to the full-scale buildings that will be x14 the size of the pilot and will present different types of challenges.