Rabot Is a Productivity Tool, Not Just a Camera

An old slide that holds up better than it should

Last week I found a slide from a pilot we ran in 2021 and never published. It is kind of wild how well it holds up.

Here is the thing people get wrong about us. They see Rabot as a camera. It catches the missing item when a customer complains. It stops the packer from grabbing the wrong SKU. All true, and honestly that is the part most people stop at.

But that was never the main event. Rabot is a productivity tool.

Productivity in three stages

The old slide broke productivity into three stages.

From an internal Rabot pilot deck, 2021.

Process improvement comes first: station layout, time studies, finding the outliers. No WMS integration, no new hardware. We guessed it might get us around 20%. It got 33%.

UI automation comes next: prefill, barcode scanning, item and dim-weight verification. Another 20% or so, once the system is integrated.

Peripheral automation sits on top: auto-dispensing tape, dunnage, the physical steps around the packout. Another 15%.

What stuck with me is that the first stage, on its own, beat the number we set for it. No automation. No new hardware. We just made it possible to see what was actually happening at each station, and then people did something about it.

From an internal Rabot pilot deck, 2021.

The proof is in the data operators never had

Over the years a lot of our customers have hit numbers like these. Yusen Logistics improved pack times 40%. DaVinci cut processing time 30% across 6 warehouses and dropped exception rates from 7.5% to 2%. Atomix is one of the highest we have ever seen: they went from 35 orders an hour to 79, and cost per package dropped 64%. Nothing exotic. Just data they had never had before, and the discipline to act on it.

We are not done

There is another case study coming that pushes this even further: operators using the product the way it was meant to be used, past the proof, past the prevention, running their whole floor off live numbers and tightening it up week over week. Some of the most incredible results we have seen are still ahead of us.

That is really the whole bet for me. The best operators do not choose between cheaper and better. They get both, because they can finally see what is going on.

And most of the industry has not even done stage one yet.