Cartesian Kinetics

Cartesian Kinetics faced a challenge common across consumer goods distribution: how to dramatically increase order fulfillment throughput without the luxury of building a new facility. Existing warehouse footprints in the consumer goods sector are rarely designed for modern e-commerce order profiles — high SKU counts, small order sizes, and demanding fulfillment windows. Retrofitting an operational warehouse compounds the difficulty, since any disruption to pick operations directly impacts customer order cycles. The status quo — traditional pick-to-location workflows requiring pickers to travel to products — creates a throughput ceiling that cannot scale with demand without proportional headcount increases.

Cartesian Kinetics engineered a Goods-to-Person (GTP) automation system designed specifically for retrofit deployment inside existing warehouse structures. Rather than requiring a greenfield build, the system brings storage locations to stationary pick stations, eliminating most picker travel. The control architecture was built on Rockwell Automation's Allen-Bradley platform, providing the motion control, I/O, and programmable controller infrastructure required to orchestrate robotic storage and retrieval reliably. Critically, the system was designed for phased installation — allowing warehouses to maintain live fulfillment operations while automation cells were commissioned in adjacent areas. This approach allowed Cartesian Kinetics to replicate the control architecture across multiple customer sites, reducing integration engineering effort on each successive deployment.

Cartesian Kinetics successfully deployed the GTP system in warehouse retrofit environments, delivering measurable throughput gains within existing facility boundaries. The Rockwell-based control platform demonstrated the uptime reliability required for continuous fulfillment operations, where unplanned downtime has direct downstream impact on order shipment commitments. Key outcomes include:

• 3–5x improvement in picker productivity versus traditional pick-to-location methods
• Higher order fulfillment throughput achieved without facility expansion or proportional labor increases
• Continuous warehouse operations maintained throughout phased installation
• Reusable control architecture across multiple site deployments, reducing per-site integration complexity

• Goods-to-Person delivers among the highest ROI of any warehouse investment — 3–5x picker productivity gains make payback periods competitive even for SMEs.
• Phased deployment is non-negotiable for retrofit projects; plan automation cell sequencing so live pick operations are never fully interrupted.
• Standardizing on a proven control platform (such as Allen-Bradley) pays dividends across multi-site rollouts by enabling code reuse and reducing commissioning time.
• Existing building constraints should be treated as design inputs, not obstacles — GTP systems engineered around real footprints outperform solutions that assume ideal conditions.