Q: How would you describe your company’s primary business?
A: Our mission at 6 River Systems is to make fulfillment faster with innovative products that generate immediate and lasting value for our customers. Starting with Chuck, a collaborative mobile robot, 6 River Systems is building fulfillment solutions that power the winning warehouses of the future.
Q: In brief, what is your history with the company?
A: I joined 6 River Systems as vice president of marketing, and our first marketing hire, in early 2018. Over the past year we’ve focused our efforts on branding, awareness and engagement and have recently been acknowledged by a leading analyst as a “Leader” in the area of fulfillment robots.
Q: How has your company changed through the years?
A: In 2011 Rylan Hamilton and Jerome Dubois met at Kiva Systems. Fast forward to 2015, Rylan is running Solutions at Amazon Robotics and Jerome is running strategic initiatives within Amazon’s Seller Services organization. During this time Chris Cacioppo was building interactive hardware and software solutions. The team started working out of Jerome’s kitchen in 2015. We built most of our first robot over the course of a few months in that very room. We did our first deployment in 2017 and now coming towards the middle of 2019 our robot Chuck is in 30 warehouses across North America and Europe fulfilling over one million items per week.
Q: What critical issues do your clients rarely know they have or might encounter?
A: Many clients don’t know that there are options when it comes to warehouse automation and not all options cost tens of millions of dollars to deploy and take years to see a return on the investment. We realized we can deliver comparable value of traditional automation to our customers by shrinking it down into on-demand services.
Q: In what ways can you help your customers overcome today’s manufacturing challenges?
A: Demands on manufacturing companies are growing exponentially, especially in the warehouse and manufacturing floor. Yet finding and retaining quality personnel is getting more difficult, and seasonal hires take time to train; especially if you’re trying to leverage automation technologies. All these factors are causing chaos on the fulfillment center and manufacturing floor as ill-equipped associates try to fulfill more orders, more quickly, to meet increasing customer expectations for faster delivery times. Meet Chuck. Chuck is a collaborative mobile robot that uses powerful cloud-based software, machine learning, and AI to get smarter and more efficient as it works. Chuck can double and triple the productivity of your associates — at half the cost of traditional automation; without requiring any new infrastructure, or changing your warehouse layout.
Q: What are you excited to bring manufacturing professionals in 2019?
A: We just launched a new system called “Mobile Sort” to enable warehouse operators to intelligently generate and fulfill batched orders using robots, mobile sort stations, and cloud-based software enhanced with machine learning. Warehouse operators struggle to find and recruit enough warehouse associates to keep up with the work. U.S. warehouses need to hire an additional 452,000 workers between 2018 and 2019 amid record-low unemployment nationwide, just to meet the growing demand. Mobile Sort is designed to help operators rise to meet peak demands and challenges.
For more information, visit 6river.com.
