The world's largest sporting goods retailer is seeing warehouse productivity boosts with robots

• Decathlon, a global sporting goods chain, automated seven of its European warehouses using Exotec.
• Exotec is a French startup that makes warehouse robots and automation systems for moving goods.
• Exotec's CEO said companies can reduce the warehouse footprint while increasing order output.

Decathlon, the world's largest sporting goods retailer, said on Tuesday that it's seeing "significant" productivity gains at seven of its European warehouses, where it has been using robots from Exotec to sort and pack items for brick-and-mortar stores.

Exotec's CEO and cofounder, Romain Moulin, said the benefits run across the board, from reduced warehouse footprint to increased items shipped out of the facilities.

At its Portugal warehouse, Decathlon said the site doubled the number of orders it can prepare from 57,000 to 114,000.

The human work is also changing, as employees are walking less throughout the warehouse or being reassigned entirely, Moulin said.

"The working conditions are much better," Moulin told Business Insider.

Exotec's robots are not bipedal humanoids. Its flagship product, called Skypods, is a fleet of wheeled robots — think rectangular Roombas — that can move, store, and retrieve hundreds of thousands of items a day from storage bins stacked on their heads.

The robots also move three-dimensionally. Each Skypod attaches to Exotec's proprietary storage rack and can climb up to about 46 feet. It's an important feature that Moulin said allows clients like Decathlon to reduce the footprint of warehouses — allowing workers to walk less — and increase the density of items stored inside the facility.

With robotics and software, Moulin's company is proposing a warehouse system that automates the entire flow of goods, from arrival to shipment, and standardizes it so companies can quickly adapt it across multiple sites.

The system could include 150 to 200 Skypods, automatic depalletizers and palletizers, carton-opening machines, and RFID tunnels that scan items on a conveyor belt.

"Every four months, we could start a new warehouse," Moulin said.

Human work changes

In a standard, brownfield warehouse, items are organized on shelves stacked 6 to 7 feet high to accommodate the height of human workers. Those workers, called pickers, then push around carts and retrieve items from the shelves to prepare an order.

This, in turn, requires companies to seek larger spaces to accommodate increased shelf space as they face massive order demand. The average warehouse size is about 194,000 square feet, Moulin said.

"That's why workers are doing 10 kilometers per day, and that's why density is so low," the Exotec CEO said.

With automation, that changes. Moulin said Exotec's robotics platform can reduce a warehouse's footprint to 65,000 square feet; that doesn't mean warehouses need to downsize. Companies can either dedicate more space to shelving items or to other operations.

Decathlon, which has more than 1,800 stores and 101,000 employees, said walking distance for pickers at its logistics site in the UK has decreased from over 6 miles to under 1 mile per day.

A US-based Decathlon spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

The company also said it's seeing improvements in workplace safety. At the same UK site, Decathlon said workplace incidents related to order picking have decreased from 1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000.

Part of that could also be attributed to Exotec's platform, which allows pickers to be moved to other operations, Moulin said.

An Exotec spokesperson said that, at one site, 50 people were designated pickers before Skypods were installed. Now, the number has dropped to 12 pickers, while other workers were reassigned to other tasks.

Moulin said companies shift those workers to other jobs, such as return or repair operations, while throughput increases.

According to Decathlon, one warehouse in France nearly doubled the number of stores it can replenish, from 37 to 73. At its Portugal site, the number of stores has increased from 41 to 73.

Robots don't need to look human

The big bet for retailers, Moulin said, is that warehouse automation can help companies move more goods while easing persistent labor shortages.

"All of our customers — in Europe, in the US, in Japan — say the same thing, 'I can't find people to do the job,'" Moulin said, adding that customers also want to double the throughput of their facilities.

Some industries are looking toward humanoid robots to solve the labor gap. Automakers like Hyundai and Toyota are experimenting with bipedal bots, assigning them to simple tasks.

Moulin said the advancements seen in AI and robotics are being applied to Exotec's platform, but his clients don't have an immediate need for humanoids.

"We don't use a humanoid to push a cart doing 10 kilometers a day, because that's exactly the problem with manual picking," he said. "So we use the most simple robots to move inventory and we power it with AI."