机器人不会罢工，但可能引发火灾
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[b]Ocado大火引发高密度仓库风险担忧[/b]
综合英国《太阳报》，彭博社，路途社，BBC的新闻还原2019年2月5日在英国最大生鲜电商Ocado的智能化立体仓库中心大火。
2019年2月5日凌晨，英国最大的生鲜电商Ocado位于汉普郡的拥有最先进技术的全自动立体化仓库发生火灾，近200名消防队员，20多辆消防车参与救火。根据汉普郡消防和救援服务中心的首席官员尼尔·奥丁(Neil Odin)的说法，大火在仓库里高处开始，喷水灭火系统仅在其早期起作用，随后就无法控制。由于货架和楼层充满钢结构，整个消防救援工作相当艰难，消防员不得不在屋顶钻孔，从仓库上部攻入仓库。该仓库离城镇只有两英里，因此火灾产生的巨大浓烟和氨气等物质引发居民的恐慌。火灾在持续3天后扑灭，整个现代化的仓库已经成为废墟。
这座建成于2016年的自动化仓库，是Ocado的旗舰仓库，整个仓库面积24万平方英尺，耗资4500万英镑，5层高，配备最先进的自动化设施，包括600个自动处理订单的机器人。该中心仓库处理约10%的Ocado订单，每周需要处理7万个订单。
火灾对Ocado的影响相当巨大，数以万计的订单被取消，直接损失5800万美金，对公司产生的整体损失预计超过4亿美金。除非在别处增加仓储和分拣能力，该物流中心的订单应对缺口将无法弥补。
巧合的是在当天，Ocado高管们正在伦敦的一间会议室里公布季度收益。首席执行官蒂姆施泰纳正在讲解公司机器人仓库的优点，并在为该仓库制定计划。
对于Ocado来说，火灾提醒人们，自动化的进程有一种刺痛。机器可能是高效和安全的工人，但是当灾难发生时，他们的环境不适合人为干预。如果零售商的风险集中在几个昂贵的仓库而不是数百家商店，那么财务影响会更糟。
牛津零售管理学院(College Instituteof Retail Management)学术主任乔纳森雷诺兹(Jonathan Reynolds)表示，“如果出现问题，密集仓储在其中一些地方会遇到实际的，结构性的挑战。” “在理解自动化的含义方面逐渐增长。”
Ocado仓库的“智能平台”网格上的机器人被认为是电商领域密集仓库的领先技术，目前Ocado已经与美国的Kroger，法国的Casino Guichard-Perrachon以及其他零售商签订了共同建造的许可协议。Ocado也在大力推进了这一概念，它将自己视为一家科技公司而非零售商。它创造了自己的基础设施，技术和软件，包括可以挑选水果和蔬菜等精致物品的机器人手臂。
自动化仓库并不新鲜。亚马逊在全球的配送中心使用超过100,000台机器人。智能化机器人也已经成为未来的发展趋势。
Forrester Research的分析师George Lawrie表示，自动化仓库通常比传统设施更高，更窄，因为不需要人们在楼层之间移动，节省租金，他为零售商提供技术建议，使他们的业务更具竞争力。
“消防部门需要提前考虑改变以及风险如何发展，”英国消防队联盟秘书长Matt Wrack先生说。“关于自动化存在很大争议，这表明这些场所的数量将会增加。”
Ocado物流分拣中心的大火，是一个灾难性的事件，但是对整个物流快递行业是一个警示，当仓库越来越紧密，自动化程度越来越高的形况下，电器的安全，机器人的安全，锂电池的安全等都摆在面前。从某种意义上，在物流向科技进行转化的进程中，这次火灾正是一个及时的提醒。机器人工人不能继续罢工 但他们可能会起火。
Robot Workers Can't Go on Strike But They Can Go Up in FlamesBy
Katie Linsell and
Ellen Milligan
March 3, 2019, 1:00 AM ESTUpdated on March 4, 2019, 1:00 AM EST
The fire at the Ocado Andover facility. Source: HFRS
The Andover fire brigade was alerted at 2.34 a.m. About 2 miles across town, a fire had broken out in the early hours of Feb. 5 at a state-of-the-art Ocado Group Plc warehouse. Within minutes, firefighters were tackling a blaze that eventually reduced the five-floor facility in southern England to a tangle of smoking metal.
Later that day, Ocado executives presented quarterly earnings in a conference room in London. Chief Executive Officer Tim Steiner touted the virtues of the company’s robotic warehouses, laying out plans for Andover. He didn’t mention the fire, which raged on for three more days.
The fire at the Ocado Andover facility.
Source: HFRS
For Ocado, the blaze was a reminder that the march of automation has a sting in the tail. Machines may be efficient and safe workers, but their environment isn’t designed for human intervention when disaster strikes. The financial repercussions can also be worse if a retailer’s risk is concentrated in a few expensive warehouses rather than hundreds of stores.
“There is a physical, configurational challenge about some of these places if something goes wrong,” said Jonathan Reynolds, academic director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management. “There’s a gradual growth in understanding the implications of automation.”
Ocado is not the only e-commerce provider to suffer from such incidents. Fashion brand Asos Plc has had three warehouse fires since 2005.Ambient Grid
The online grocer said on Feb. 5 that the fire started in what is called the ambient grid, where food is stored at room temperature. A spokeswoman declined to comment further on the cause.
The blaze began high in the warehouse and was so difficult to reach that firefighters had to cut holes in the roof, according to Neil Odin, chief officer at Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service. A sprinkler system only contained the fire in its early stages. It took more than 200 people to quell the flames.
The 240,000 square-foot Andover facility was the first of its kind when it was built in 2016 and was designed to encourage other retailers to partner with Ocado to improve their online deliveries. The site filled about 10 percent of Ocado’s orders and revenue growth is expected to suffer until capacity can be increased elsewhere.
Ocado has secured lucrative licensing deals with Kroger Co. in the U.S., Casino Guichard-Perrachon SA in France and other grocers thanks to the technology. Kroger is pressing on with its tie-up, naming two locations for new facilities with the U.K. company’s software. Last week Ocado added a 750 million-pound (about $1 billion) investment from Marks & Spencer Group Plc to form a grocery-delivery joint venture.
Ocado has shared information about the cause of the fire with partners like Kroger and M&S, and the companies aren’t deterred, Steiner told reporters at a London briefing last week.
Ocado Smart Platform robots at Andover.
Photographer: Ocado Technology600 Robots
“We are not concerned that there is a fundamental issue with the design,” the CEO said. “Will we learn lessons from it? Of course we will. We always learn lessons from our mistakes. Can we improve things and make sure things are safer in the future? Yes. But there is no issue there.”
The burned warehouse featured 17 stacks of crates and a grid at the top where more than 600 robotsfill orders in seconds. That’s about the same size as the unit’s workforce of humans, some of whom operate below the network, bagging orders.
Automated warehouses are generally taller and narrower than more traditional facilities because there’s no need for people to move between floors and it saves on rent, according to George Lawrie, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. who advises retailers on technology to make their businesses more competitive.
The 45 million-pound Andover facility was on the outskirts of town, but in the future warehouses will be closer to city centers for quicker distribution, he said. Ocado is already testing a service to handle one-hour deliveries from smaller urban sites.
“The fire service needs to think ahead about change and how risk develops,” said Matt Wrack, general secretary of the U.K. Fire Brigades Union. “There’s a big debate about automation which suggests these sorts of premises are going to grow in number.’’Tech Focus
Automated warehouses aren’t new. Amazon.com Inc. uses more than 100,000 robots in its distribution centers worldwide. But Ocado has advanced the concept, and it sees itself as more of a tech company than a grocer. It has created its own infrastructure, technology and software, including robotic arms that can pick delicate items such as fruit and vegetables. The tie-up with M&S will allow it to focus even more on technology.
Fire damage at online retailers’ sites can be costly. Asos halted distribution for more than a month in 2005 after an oil depot explosion set one of its facilities alight in southern England. Another blaze in 2014 stopped orders from a different U.K. site, costing it as much as 30 million pounds in lost sales. Police considered the cause of the second fire to be arson.
A fire at an Asos facility near Berlin in 2017 ruined inventory worth about 6 million pounds, though none of the technology or structure was affected. A spokesman declined to comment on these fires.H&M, Zara
Machines are increasingly creeping into retail as consumers demand convenience, cheap prices and quick delivery. Swedish apparel chain Hennes & Mauritz AB automated a logistics center in Poland last year to increase capacity and speed up deliveries across Europe. Inditex SA’s Zara has even used robotics to place garments straight into shoppers’ hands in its flagship London store.
Robots may eventually become so advanced that they can douse flames themselves, according to Lawrie at Forrester.
“If they are sufficiently smart to be able to pick the produce, I’m sure they are quite smart enough to fight a fire,” he said.
— With assistance by Will Mathis, Jeremy Kahn, and Anna Molin
- Ocado warehouse fire highlights risks of automated retail
- U.K. online grocer forges ahead with technology partnerships
The fire at the Ocado Andover facility. Source: HFRS
The Andover fire brigade was alerted at 2.34 a.m. About 2 miles across town, a fire had broken out in the early hours of Feb. 5 at a state-of-the-art Ocado Group Plc warehouse. Within minutes, firefighters were tackling a blaze that eventually reduced the five-floor facility in southern England to a tangle of smoking metal.
Later that day, Ocado executives presented quarterly earnings in a conference room in London. Chief Executive Officer Tim Steiner touted the virtues of the company’s robotic warehouses, laying out plans for Andover. He didn’t mention the fire, which raged on for three more days.
The fire at the Ocado Andover facility.
Source: HFRS
For Ocado, the blaze was a reminder that the march of automation has a sting in the tail. Machines may be efficient and safe workers, but their environment isn’t designed for human intervention when disaster strikes. The financial repercussions can also be worse if a retailer’s risk is concentrated in a few expensive warehouses rather than hundreds of stores.
“There is a physical, configurational challenge about some of these places if something goes wrong,” said Jonathan Reynolds, academic director of the Oxford Institute of Retail Management. “There’s a gradual growth in understanding the implications of automation.”
Ocado is not the only e-commerce provider to suffer from such incidents. Fashion brand Asos Plc has had three warehouse fires since 2005.Ambient Grid
The online grocer said on Feb. 5 that the fire started in what is called the ambient grid, where food is stored at room temperature. A spokeswoman declined to comment further on the cause.
The blaze began high in the warehouse and was so difficult to reach that firefighters had to cut holes in the roof, according to Neil Odin, chief officer at Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service. A sprinkler system only contained the fire in its early stages. It took more than 200 people to quell the flames.
The 240,000 square-foot Andover facility was the first of its kind when it was built in 2016 and was designed to encourage other retailers to partner with Ocado to improve their online deliveries. The site filled about 10 percent of Ocado’s orders and revenue growth is expected to suffer until capacity can be increased elsewhere.
Ocado has secured lucrative licensing deals with Kroger Co. in the U.S., Casino Guichard-Perrachon SA in France and other grocers thanks to the technology. Kroger is pressing on with its tie-up, naming two locations for new facilities with the U.K. company’s software. Last week Ocado added a 750 million-pound (about $1 billion) investment from Marks & Spencer Group Plc to form a grocery-delivery joint venture.
Ocado has shared information about the cause of the fire with partners like Kroger and M&S, and the companies aren’t deterred, Steiner told reporters at a London briefing last week.
Ocado Smart Platform robots at Andover.
Photographer: Ocado Technology600 Robots
“We are not concerned that there is a fundamental issue with the design,” the CEO said. “Will we learn lessons from it? Of course we will. We always learn lessons from our mistakes. Can we improve things and make sure things are safer in the future? Yes. But there is no issue there.”
The burned warehouse featured 17 stacks of crates and a grid at the top where more than 600 robotsfill orders in seconds. That’s about the same size as the unit’s workforce of humans, some of whom operate below the network, bagging orders.
Automated warehouses are generally taller and narrower than more traditional facilities because there’s no need for people to move between floors and it saves on rent, according to George Lawrie, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. who advises retailers on technology to make their businesses more competitive.
The 45 million-pound Andover facility was on the outskirts of town, but in the future warehouses will be closer to city centers for quicker distribution, he said. Ocado is already testing a service to handle one-hour deliveries from smaller urban sites.
“The fire service needs to think ahead about change and how risk develops,” said Matt Wrack, general secretary of the U.K. Fire Brigades Union. “There’s a big debate about automation which suggests these sorts of premises are going to grow in number.’’Tech Focus
Automated warehouses aren’t new. Amazon.com Inc. uses more than 100,000 robots in its distribution centers worldwide. But Ocado has advanced the concept, and it sees itself as more of a tech company than a grocer. It has created its own infrastructure, technology and software, including robotic arms that can pick delicate items such as fruit and vegetables. The tie-up with M&S will allow it to focus even more on technology.
Fire damage at online retailers’ sites can be costly. Asos halted distribution for more than a month in 2005 after an oil depot explosion set one of its facilities alight in southern England. Another blaze in 2014 stopped orders from a different U.K. site, costing it as much as 30 million pounds in lost sales. Police considered the cause of the second fire to be arson.
A fire at an Asos facility near Berlin in 2017 ruined inventory worth about 6 million pounds, though none of the technology or structure was affected. A spokesman declined to comment on these fires.H&M, Zara
Machines are increasingly creeping into retail as consumers demand convenience, cheap prices and quick delivery. Swedish apparel chain Hennes & Mauritz AB automated a logistics center in Poland last year to increase capacity and speed up deliveries across Europe. Inditex SA’s Zara has even used robotics to place garments straight into shoppers’ hands in its flagship London store.
Robots may eventually become so advanced that they can douse flames themselves, according to Lawrie at Forrester.
“If they are sufficiently smart to be able to pick the produce, I’m sure they are quite smart enough to fight a fire,” he said.
— With assistance by Will Mathis, Jeremy Kahn, and Anna Molin
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