Goods-to-Person Warehouse Automation
In a traditional warehouse, pickers spend 60-70% of their time walking — not picking. That walking time is the single largest waste in order fulfilment. Goods-to-person automation reverses the equation: autonomous forklifts retrieve pallets and deliver them to stationary picking stations, so your team picks continuously without taking a step.
The Walking Problem
Order pickers in a typical Australian warehouse walk between 15 and 20 kilometres per shift. That distance translates directly into labour cost, injury risk, and throughput limits:
- 60-70% of picker time is travel — only 30-40% is spent on the value-adding act of picking, scanning, and packing
- Repetitive motion injuries — constant walking on concrete floors causes knee, hip, and lower back injuries that drive workers' compensation claims
- Fatigue degrades accuracy — pick error rates climb 40% in the second half of a shift as fatigue accumulates from kilometres of walking
- Labour cost scales linearly — doubling throughput means doubling headcount, because walking speed is the bottleneck, not picking speed
- Peak surges overwhelm the floor — seasonal spikes require temporary pickers who learn the warehouse layout slowly and make more errors
How Goods-to-Person Changes the Equation
Stationary Pickers, Moving Pallets
Pickers stand at ergonomic workstations while autonomous forklifts deliver the next pallet. No walking, no searching, no wasted steps. Pick rates increase from 80 lines/hour to over 200 lines/hour.
60-80% Walk Time Reduction
Autonomous retrieval eliminates aisle travel entirely. Pickers handle the value-adding work — identification, picking, quality check — while robots handle the transport.
Scale With Robots, Not People
Peak demand? Deploy additional autonomous units to feed picking stations faster. No recruitment, no training, no roster headaches. Throughput scales with fleet size, not headcount.
Pick-to-Light & Voice Integration
Our goods-to-person system integrates with pick-to-light indicators and voice picking systems at the workstation. The autonomous forklift delivers the pallet; the guidance system directs the picker to the exact SKU and quantity.
Goods-to-Person Fleet
| Role | Model | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Pallet retrieval from racking | 1.4T Reach Truck | Retrieves pallets from high-bay racking and delivers to pick station |
| High-level retrieval | 1.6T Reach Truck | Reaches upper levels in deep racking configurations |
| Floor-level transport | 2.0T Pallet Mover | High-speed ground transport between racking zone and pick stations |
| Narrow-aisle retrieval | 1.4T Slim Forklift | Operates in aisles as narrow as 1.8m for dense storage layouts |
| Replenishment from reserve | 1.0T Pallet Stacker | Moves single pallets from reserve stock to forward pick locations |
Goods-to-Person in Australian Warehousing
Australia's warehouse sector faces a structural labour shortage. With unemployment under 4% and warehouse roles competing against construction, mining, and logistics for the same labour pool, many 3PL operators cannot fill picker positions at any wage. Goods-to-person automation decouples throughput from headcount — the same team picks two to three times more volume when autonomous forklifts handle all transport.
Unlike shuttle systems or carousel-based goods-to-person, forklift-based retrieval works with standard pallet racking. There is no need to redesign your warehouse layout or invest in proprietary racking. The autonomous fleet navigates your existing aisles, retrieves standard pallets, and delivers them to workstations positioned at the end of racking runs or along a central spine.