Active Ants, a subsidiary of the bpost group, has announced it will open its 5th fulfilment centre in the UK September 2022. The newest facility is located in Northampton, England and is owned by M&G Real Estate, the property investment arm of M&G plc. The facility is in the Brackmills Industrial Estate, which has received an ‘outstanding’ BREEAM certificate for sustainability.
After opening 2 sites in the Netherlands, Active Ants has also recently expanded into Belgium and Germany.
According to Active Ants, it is one of the largest e-fulfilment players in the Netherlands with over 250 customers and around 5m orders per year.
Co-founder and Managing Partner Jeroen Dekker commented: “We offer tailor made B2C logistics for SME web shops.” Regarding the new fulfilment centre, Dekker stated: “storage, order picking, packaging, and sorting are also fully automated in this new fulfilment centre. For order picking, employees work efficiently together with robots. The receipt of goods and the return flow remain manual processes. This mechanisation ensures efficiency, high quality and a pleasant working environment for our employees”.
The basis of Active Ants warehouse is the Autostore, a system where goods are stored compactly in bins. On top of the AutoStore is a framework of rails, on which robots ride. Autonomous Mobile Robots) bring empty boxes to employees who then fill them with goods delivered by the storage robots. According to Active Ants, the Autostore requires 6 times less space than in a traditional warehouse.
Active Ants also stated that this good-to-man system has a very low carbon footprint. The system stores up to six times more stock per square metre, and the robots reuse their own energy, so electrical consumption is minimal.
Carrier robots then drive to various packing machines which select the ideal size boxes and close them to size – weighing them and providing a shipping label, so that no padding material is needed. The subsidiary reported that ss a result, Active Ants transports on average 40.0% less air to the customer. This also allows the company to transport more packages in a truck and reduce our CO2 emissions even further. Once filled, closed, and printed, the carrier robots pick up the parcels and sort them out for their respective carriers.
Active Ants’ reported that in its Northampton facility, its specially developed box closing machines has a built-in printer for customers. Dekker stated that ”this allows every customer to get their own custom printed box. Through this unique functionality, we enable large, but now also smaller webshops, to offer customised packaging. Keeping pre-printed boxes in stock is no longer necessary. This saves our customers costs and reduces their footprint’.”
Source: bpost
