Leader brings in robots to Sydney warehouse

IT distributor Leader Computers has brought in robotics technology from Dematic to automate its Sydney warehouse.

Leader brought in Dematic’s AutoStore automated storage, goods-to-person (GTP) picking and fulfilment system in an effort to maximise warehouse space and reduce manual labour work.

“Throughout the pandemic, working from home and home-schooling really took off, and demand for IT infrastructure exploded,” Dematic consulting manager David Lamb said.

“This led to Leader Computers experiencing increased orders from the resellers and more pressure on their warehouse operations.”

Leader said it wanted to upgrade the Sydney warehouse in response to increased demand, taking aim at automation technology to help increase business efficiency, accuracy and productivity, while also ensuring better use of available space.

Leader managing director Theo Kristoris said, “Leader’s purpose is to help our resellers grow and be highly profitable. We are always looking at ways to get stock to our resellers quickly.”

“This solution allows us to ship fast and on-time to thousands of MSPs and IT resellers in Australia. We are proud to be at the cutting edge of technology and to bring this automation to our resellers.”

Leader’s AutoStore includes nine robots, three goods-to-person ports and 6,662 bins. Palletised products are manually delivered to an AutoStore port, where an operator receives and loads them into totes delivered by robots.

“The requirements for this automation project were: one, save labour; two, save warehouse space; and three, for Leader Computers to walk the talk of how to use technology to improve business,” Lamb said.

“As receiving tasks are completed, robots collect the totes for delivery to the high-density storage grid. As orders are received, robots then retrieve totes and deliver them in sequence to operators at two carousel ports.”

The warehouse, located in the Sydney suburb of Lidcombe, stores some 8,500 product SKUs, ranging from large server racks and monitors to smaller sized products like USB thumb drives and CPUs.

“Before the Dematic solution was implemented, a large order of a few different types of hard drives would take five to six hours to pick. With this new AutoStore system, they've been able to pick a similar type of order in just 30 minutes,” Lamb said.

Leader said the implementation was completed over an eight-week period amid COVID-19 interruptions, and Dematic still works with the distie on 24-hour on-call support and scheduled maintenance.