SDI and Kindred partner to automate retail fulfillment and augment human labor

SDI has announced a partnership with Kindred to integrate its materials handling systems and technology with Kindred’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based, pick-and-place robotic solutions. The partnership will help customers meet increasing retail fulfillment demands throughout the entire year, including peak seasons, according to SDI.

SDI’s Distribution Center Management System (DCMS) software application incorporates all parts of DC operations, from the basic to the most complex waving and management solutions for retail, wholesale, fulfillment and e-commerce industries. The solution is scalable, easily supported, and the tools allow the DC manager to get the performance from the hardware and software solutions provided.

“We are really excited about this partnership,” Krish Nathan, SDI CEO, said. “As an integrator, we’re eager to be able to offer such a great product to our clients and to partner with an innovative company such as Kindred.”

Warehouse associates work collaboratively with Kindred’s SORT to sort items into individual customer orders quickly and accurately. The robots arrive ready to operate, with minimal associate training, and adapt to each distribution center’s unique requirements. Kindred’s machine learning algorithms also improve robot performance over time for the entire fleet.

“At Kindred, we pride ourselves on helping our clients to meet increased demand with greater efficiency and to future-proof their operations through automation,” said Joe Nentwig, VP Sales at Kindred. “Partnering with integrators such as SDI greatly helps us realize client KPIs for our entire install base.”

SORT pick and place robots utilize CORE/AutoGrasp, a robotics AI platform that identifies items to pick, place and sort into complete end-customer orders. Kindred’s CORE/AutoGrasp combines AI-powered machine vision, grasping and manipulation algorithms that handle a range of merchandise, including deformable items such as polybagged items. Kindred SORT robots have picked more than 100 million units in production to date.