The next step in FedEx's automation journey: Handling the largest and smallest packages
Executive Ted Dengel details the company's investments to tackle the two ends of the "package bell curve" and keep up with the volume surge.
An average-sized package traveling through one of FedEx Ground's automated facilities requires human contact at only two points: unloading and loading.
"When they're taken off the truck on the unload side, they go through the conveyors and through the whole sortation system," Ted Dengel, FedEx Ground managing director of operations technology and innovation, said in an interview. "Then, they get loaded onto a trailer on the other side for the second touch."
FedEx Ground has more than 150 fully automated facilities in its network after adding 16 ahead of the peak holiday shipping season. Fewer steps involving manual inputs are vital for the company to keep service levels high amid a challenging labor environment and a boom in e-commerce volume since the COVID-19 pandemic began. FedEx as a whole is expected to deliver 100 million more holiday packages than in 2019.
But some of these packages won't be able to travel through a fully automated sortation system due to their unwieldy dimensions. As consumers become more comfortable ordering anything and everything online, FedEx is encountering more oddly-sized items like furniture, tires and televisions that don't mesh well with its automated facilities.
"Robotic arms do the same thing over and over and over really well," Dengel said. "But in our world, every transaction is almost a different challenge for the robot. So we started looking at other ways on how to combine bulk material handling and some robotics to try and get the throughput we needed to match what humans could do, as well as to handle the variability."
FedEx's recent automation investments targeted what Dengel calls the package bell curve. The majority of the carrier's volume that constitutes the middle of the curve can be handled through automated sorters. But the ends of the curve — the smallest and largest-sized packages — have always been handled in a more manual fashion.