Exotec, a leader in warehouse robotics, is extending its technological capability to include the full integration of the warehouse.
The business, France’s first industrial unicorn which counts Carrefour, Decathlon and UNIQLO as key customers, revealed its journey at a launch event for its new global HQ in Lille this week.
New warehouse scenarios will be tailored to individual customers and deploy new technologies such as palletisation and RFID reading, alongside its established Skypod robots for picking and packing, the company said.
“We have the building blocks to deploy elegant warehouses,” said co-founders Romain Moulinx and Renaud Heitz. “Each warehouse is different, the challenge is to combine the speed of the robot with flexibility.”
The business has already launched a complete warehouse integration project with Pepsico in the US in 2025, where it is ‘selling full warehouses’, including 500 Skypod robots.
The US market now accounts for half of the company’s growth, Moulinx and Heitz revealed. Exotec launched its American HQ in Atlanta in 2020, five years after the business was founded in France. The business won its first retail customer – e-commerce retailer Cdiscount – in 2016 and went on to secure UNIQLO as a customer in 2019. Central Europe followed in 2021 and this year the business has secured its first customer in South Korea: MUSINSA, a leading fashion platform.
The co-founders stressed innovation was the ‘kickstarter’ of the business and its aim was to be first and faster than the competition.
Ten per cent of revenue is invested in R&D, while the business has filed 400 patents to protect its ideas worldwide, Heitz reported.
“The future will be engineered in the new building,” Moulinx said, and it will be the hub for the Exotec international team.
Tom Anderson, principle analyst and co-founder of supply chain publisher STIQ, hosted a series of panel sessions at the Exotec HQ opening event, featuring industry experts, retail customers and company executives.
First up was Xavier Lhors from Exotec customer Renault.
Lhors shared how a strategic partnership approach, between France’s automative industry flagship and the country’s first industrial unicorn, has automated and served after-sales more effectively.
He reported Exotec had helped Renault move from picking zero to 28,000 lines per day in six months. Picking, which used to take two hours, had been cut to 15 minutes, he said. This gave customers a one hour plus cut off time for late orders.
Further, errors have been reduced by one third and productivity had increased 50%; while the ROI was fewer than two years.
Now Renault is extending the solution from France to Germany, where it is managing 25,000 SKUs with 85 robots picking 7,000 lines per day.
Two former Ocado executives discussed how supply chains are adapting to the hybrid model of on- and offline sales in grocery retail.
Marie-Axelle Loustalot-Forest, a former chief commercial officer at Ocado and now senior advisor, suggested supply chains should be optimised to the shopping mission but reminded delegates the majority of grocery shopping still took place in physical stores. Consumers like to shop and grocery stores provide great theatre, she said. Online is a cost to retailers, since the customers are not doing the work, she added.
Vineta Bajhaj, former group finance director at Ocado Group and now CFO at Holland & Barrett, said modular automation had made the biggest difference in business. Shopping is highly irregular and volatile and the rigidity of a central distribution centre no longer works. Retailers need micro hubs or stores become hubs, which are more efficient and drive sales, she said.
Loustalot-Forest agreed. Automation makes the biggest impact in storage and retrieval, robotic picking, order consolidation and buffering plus home delivery or autonomous delivery such as lockers or drive-through.
Loustalot-Forest suggested autonomous delivery would be the next big breakthrough since fulfilment and delivery accounted for 20% of retail costs. Reducing those costs would make online grocery more sustainable, she said.
The role of AI in retail supply chains was put under the spotlight. Bajhaj said it was a differentiator but argued businesses should focus on the “boring AI”, using it for demand forecasting and replenishment, for instance. AI-driven demand or labour forecasting unlocks assets because it’s about “where stuff needs to be”, she said.
Bajhaj said retailers wanted to deploy AI to enable people to perform more valuable jobs but there was a lack of employee understanding of the benefits of AI.
The duo considered the extend to which automation is helping retailers deliver on the trend for local and sustainability.
The best retailers are doing things very local, said Loustalot-Forest. However, she added that retailers faced many constraints on business. For Bajhaj, managing customer expectations on the availability of local lines such as artisan bread was critical.
Nicholas Hunsinger, head of ESG at Exotec, and Peter Mohnen, an expert in automation, discussed the integration of robots and people in the supply chain.
Hunsinger said robots were not perceived as a threat, rather an asset – they help to improve safety and reduce physical strain.
He referenced a study which showed workers were more attracted to factories with robots by a factor of three compared to traditional scenarios.
Mohnen said the technology had advanced significantly and the relationship between robots and people had been transformed. A decade ago there was no interaction. Today, new tech such as sensors and cameras has enabled smarter robots, which can sense the environment.
“They are not just preprogrammed but can adjust and optimise and change their reactions in real time,” he said, adding robots today were more “human like”.
The duo discussed the biggest misconceptions around automation.
Top for Hunsinger was robots being used as a way to reduce costs.
“It’s the reverse narrative – there should be more focus on the benefits,” he said; adding that it was important to ensure workers feel automation was a transformation.
Mohnen agreed. Robots transform versus kill off jobs. Companies become more productive and produce better quality, which drives success and the need for more jobs. Countries, including China, South Korea, Singapore and Germany, deploy the most robots and have the lowest levels of unemployment, he revealed.
Robots enable people to focus on more creative and skilled tasks such as optimising processes and they are more fulfilled, as a result, Hunsinger said. “People should not compete against machines but invest in skills and place people where they can make a difference,” he concluded.
