Robots are not as good as many people would think. Most of them would probably think that it would be better to own robots especially during the pick times like during the holidays. Many people could also have advised the online retailer who mentioned that the store ends up hiring an additional 50, 000 part time workers during the holiday to fill up the spaces with robotic wheels and arms.
So far, the best robot can hardly pick or lift items. It cannot also distinguish between different items from the dustbin. The only thing a robot works best is lift items and place them where workers can later pick and arrange in shelves. The chief executive officer of quiet Logistics mentioned that the robots he uses are from Kiva. Kiva is the company that Amazon bought and Welty, the CEO, admits that robots only perfume one job and one job only. Welty says that robots could replace 60 to 70 percent of the workforce in his company. Nevertheless, there are needs to have human beings in workplaces especially for the purposes of labor flexibility.
According to professor Stephen Graves from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, robots will not help Amazon much during the times when demand is on the rise. He says that robots cannot replace workers during peak times because humans are more flexible to attend to more customers than the automated machines programmed to perform one task at a time.
Another contributor to the issue, Jim Tompkins again a chief executive officer of Tompkins international said that if a company spent all its money investing in robots during the holiday season, come January it could just look at them waiting for the next holiday to use them. Amazon intentions of Kiva are what many people fail to understand if the robots they make make no big significance. Well the answer is that the issue of robots is still under the tests.
There is nothing special about Kiva mechanically only that they do have good software that ensure the robots operate well therefore Amazon might have been interested in the software for the future use and not the robots as many people thought. Amazon benefits from the software more than the robots because more people are placing robots in place and the more they are the more the demand of the software to run the robots. This is very wise of Amazon and if the latter is anything to go by.
The fact that the robots are just on tests means that there is hope for a better robots future. It is for that matter that people should use the robots where they are efficient. Such places include lifting heavy objects to save time and money where more workforces could have been required. All the chief executive officers commenting on the issue mention that robots are important but cannot replace workers in any given company.
Works cited
Grobart. Bloomberg business week. New York: New York Times, 2011.
Kurtz, David L. Contemporary Marketing. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2012
Wallenstein, Andrew. Cable biz struggles with divergent online strategies, Variety.com, 2012.
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