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by jfoutz
5228 days ago
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I'm really curious about the robot costs. The automated shelving systems i've seen look, well, really simple. I'm pretty sure i could get a half assed DIY system working for a few hundred dollars. An industrial version can't be more than 100x the price can they? 50k per mover, on the outside? edit Bam. Average $5,000,000 an install.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/18/founder-stories-mick-mountz... or less than three months labor costs, given my poor estimate. (granted this install might be orders of magnitude larger) |
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you think the same thing when you see an Oracle instance that cost tens of millions and think you could have done it with postgres. what these retailers are really paying for is reliability, redundancy and support - having a big brand co. to call when something goes wrong.
that isn't to say that there isn't a mysql/pgsql style opportunity within warehouse automation and supply chain management - it is just that it isn't likely that Wal-Mart and Amazon would be your customer. Similar development and deployment cycle as with mainframes and servers - what was once the territory of only large companies and governments is now an accessible technology and competitive advantage amongst small and medium businesses as well
The most interesting aspect of supply chain management to me is the concept of a completely outsourced warehouse - where it is cheaper to have a specialized company manage and run your inventory and supply chain as part of their larger infrastructure (and economies of scale etc.) rather than building your own warehouses and system. Amazon became very very good in this field because an outsource style solution didn't exist at the time and they had no choice other than to do it themselves, but you could imagine that an Amazon being started today would not have its own warehouses and would not be writing long letters to shareholders trying to justify hundreds of millions in capital expenses in order to automate warehouses and bring down margins.