Scaling your AMR fleet

When you embark on the journey of scaling your AMR deployment to become a crucial part of your internal workflows, you’re placing a premium on reliability and unwavering performance, 24/7. This is where your choice of AMR partner becomes pivotal. You need more than just robots; you need access to proven technology to govern your AMR fleet, additionally you need a partner, who can offer expertise, service, and unwavering support, globally and locally.

Ensure you have the right AMR platforms to scale

When looking for your scalable AMR solution you need it to be reliable and consistently performing and have a high uptime.

In small deployments, one AMR hardware problem once per year, will not affect your productivity. However, if one hundred robots all have one hardware problem once per year, it becomes a much bigger challenge. Therefore, it is important to make sure that:

• The AMRs you choose, should be robust and made from industrial materials that can withstand demanding industrial environments.

• Ease of repair is particularly important for large scale fleets to ensure higher uptime, and you need AMRs where it is easy to access the interior.

Have the right fleet management software

The more units you deploy, the greater your need for coordinating, controlling, and managing your fleet as a single internal logistics system.

Software is the key to achieve productivity at scale, your fleet management system should be able to manage different robot types with different payload capabilities and functionalities with a single software, while handling advanced maps and make it easy to create a fine-masked network of robots handling many different tasks.

Design for scale with your AMR partner

Designing a scalable solution is not only about evaluating driving distances, number of missions, and coming up with the needed number of robots.

It’s also about cooperating with the right partners to design the most reliable and productive solution.

MiR offers customers access to our dedicated application team who can help with guidance on ensuring a successful application, from Proof of Concept (PoC) to scaling the solution.

Depending on your setup, you might have your own internal team to take the ownership of scaling your application. In this case, you still need the right tools to ensure a seamless process and how to trouble-shoot potential issues.

MiR guides you and offers a wide range of commissioning guides, how-to-guides and more on our Support Portal, which you can easily access.

Prepare seamless facility integration

As you scale, you’ll want to interface your fleet management system with your company’s ERP, WMS, and other systems for even more broadly coordinated internal logistics planning and operation. MiR Fleet provides this integration via the OpenAPI protocol.

At the same time, you need the right top modules on your AMRs to ensure that you improve the productivity of your large-scale deployments.

You need AMR top modules that e.g. can connect with your existing conveyors, palletizers, shelves and more.

MiR offers a wide range of top modules out of box with our robots, and you have access to the world’s largest AMR eco system for top modules with MiR Go, which can help you realize your potential for workflow optimization.

Consider your needs for service and support

No matter which AMR provider you select, something will at some point go wrong or challenge you, when you have larger deployments where multiple robots must interact across your facility.

Depending on your setup, you need to consider how much support you require to ensure the uptime of your AMRs.

Do you have the inhouse expertise or would you rather have an AMR partner handle problems as they occur? You add complexity into your AMR installation when you scale, and MiR has a highly skilled network of Certified System Integrators who can support you from your first deployment and when you scale.

In terms of service, there are multiple aspects to consider to ensure that you are prepared for the unexpected.

You need to consider if you require access to e.g. 24/7 on-call support to address mission critical needs right away, if you need fast access to spare parts etc.

Keep your team up to date

When you depend on your AMRs to work efficiently in your core processes, it is recommended that you have inhouse experts that has the knowledge of operating and optimizing your AMRs.

This will save you time and costs. At the same time, the daily users also should have a basic understanding of how their mobile colleagues work. While some AMR vendors offer limited resources after the robots have been deployed, others offer training programs to ensure that your team becomes experts on the robots they are operating.

MiR offers free online training at different levels in MiR Academy.

From getting basic knowledge to know how to integrate fleets, MiR offers learning resources. Additionally, we offer access to MiR Community, which is digital space for people with technical relation to MiR where they can connect with each other and with MiR, inspire and be inspired through knowledge sharing and get a profound knowledge about AMRs. 

Use data and analytics to optimize your solution further

When many AMRs are interacting in a large-scale deployment, access to data and information can help you optimize your material handling workflows significantly.

Depending on your AMR vendor, you can get access to different levels of data and analytics. With MiR Insights you can get access to data so you can be updated on the health of your AMR fleet, from visualizing KPIs to identifying bottlenecks, poor WiFi, and getting an overview of actionable insights.

This helps you optimize your fleet’s performance through identification of potential risks.