Automated Warehouse In Tokyo Managed To Replace 90 Percent of Its Staff With Robots (qz.com) 73
Japanese retailer Uniqlo in Tokyo's Ariake district has managed to cut 90% of its staff and replace them with robots that are capable of inspecting and sorting the clothing housed there. The automation also allows them to operate 24 hours a day. Quartz reports: The company recently remodeled the existing warehouse with an automated system created in partnership with Daifuku, a provider of material handling systems. Now that the system is running, the company revealed during a walkthrough of the new facility, Uniqlo has been able to cut staff at the warehouse by 90%. The Japan News described how the automation works: "The robotic system is designed to transfer products delivered to the warehouse by truck, read electronic tags attached to the products and confirm their stock numbers and other information. When shipping, the system wraps products placed on a conveyor belt in cardboard and attaches labels to them. Only a small portion of work at the warehouse needs to be done by employees, the company said."
The Tokyo warehouse is just a first step in a larger plan for Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. It has announced a strategic partnership with Daifuku with the goal of automating all Fast Retailing's brand warehouses in Japan and overseas. Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.) Uniqlo believes the system will help it minimize storage costs and, importantly, deliver products faster around the world. The company has set a target of 3 trillion yen (about $26.6 billion) in annual revenue. Last year its revenue was about 1.86 trillion yen (pdf).
The Tokyo warehouse is just a first step in a larger plan for Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. It has announced a strategic partnership with Daifuku with the goal of automating all Fast Retailing's brand warehouses in Japan and overseas. Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.) Uniqlo believes the system will help it minimize storage costs and, importantly, deliver products faster around the world. The company has set a target of 3 trillion yen (about $26.6 billion) in annual revenue. Last year its revenue was about 1.86 trillion yen (pdf).
UBI (Score:1)
First!
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I meant.. Ichiban!!
Re:UBI (Score:4)
Just wait until Amazon gets ahold of this company. Those raises wont have been so expensive after all.
Uniqlo; always raising prices & CEO salary (Score:1)
Always complaining that they need to raise prices for consumers and at the same time the management is getting record high salaries & bonusses.
All the people who do the real work in this company get paid less than $9 an hour.
Can't wait until they automate the whole management and throw them out.
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In the past, middle management were the first to go. I remember the days before there were customer service systems - the SQL database that kept track of customer accounts, their addresses, contracts and orders. Each department had their own database, each with slightly different details. Sometimes a missing unit or floor number, telephone number. Orders were printed out on dockets, and floated between in, out and pending trays, then sent to "records". Then managers would approve orders, get large orders ap
One important number is missing (Score:3)
I read the article and the identical linked article.
I couldn't find the # of people employed before the 90% layoff.
How many people did the automation replace?
The implementation costs are also wildly varied, there's a factor of 10 (1 to 10 billion?, so $8M USD to $80M USD).
From the article:
Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.)
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Seems cheaper to ship the clothes to China to be sorted pressed and repacked. Possibly even cheaper to be posted within Japan to boot.
I want to see the capital spent to replace one worker - that is the real metric.
Like Ikea, there are now a lot of 'Japan' stores selling goods - most made in China or wherever with Japanesy labels, pretending to be made elsewhere.
Ikea also has automated warehouses - so does Toyota. All things being equal, the Amazon problem will come up - how to optimize pick and place to min
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A reasonable reading of that is that they have approximately 10 warehouses to automate.
Should we celebrate? (Score:3, Interesting)
Trying to figure out if losing all those jobs to a robot will make things better in Japan or anywhere? Always skeptical when we dive into solutions like this without factoring in all the human ramifications positive and negative.
Re:Should we celebrate? Yes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Japan has chronic labor shortages due to low birth rates, high longevity, and strict immigration. The latest unemployment is 2.5%. Anything that frees up people to do other things in Japan is good for them.
Re: Should we celebrate? Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
When economic and cultural conditions destroy the incentives to have kids, and create incentives to avoid having kids, can we really say it is "their fault" for not having kids?
Who is at fault for making it so hard to make ends meet that people can't afford to have kids? Or for making the courtship process a legal minefield? Or for socially engineering people to to have completely ridiculous expectations?
Re: Should we celebrate? Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern Japanese culture is a weird mix of ancient tradition and rapid post-world western influences. They work-culture westernized fast after the war, and since hard work has always been appreciated, Japan's economy boomed as people dedicated their time and careers to companies, working long days with little to no vacation time.
Westerners don't often understand the kind of pressure this puts on the workers. They're still heavily career-oriented: you're not expected to go 'shopping around' for a job that you find suitable, you're expected to pick a company once you graduate and then dedicate yourself and your career to that company. Due to age old concepts of honor, resigning from a position is seen as disgraceful, it's a sign of personal failure, and stain on your reputation. Same actually goes for firing people. Weirdly enough, many Japanese companies don't want to fire people unless they absolutely have to, as that reflects badly on the company, so instead they often just move the person or persons to do something trivial, in the hopes that they'd one day resign themselves and take the shame off the company. But since this doesn't often happen, you've got people showing up to work in many large companies doing tasks they really don't want or need to be doing, but they keep doing it,
The same attitude largely permeates the entire Japanese society. Their legal system is (in)famous for having an over 99 % conviction rate. That's right, if your case ends up in court you're going to be found guilty with 99 % certainty. This is because the prosecutors abhoar the idea of defeat (again, dishonorable) so only cases where the evidence is extremely strong will even be taken up by the prosecutors. This also means that a lot of the crime that happens goes unsolved because neither the investigators nor the prosecutors want to take up cases that will end up in failures, thus tarnishing their reputation and honor.
And the same is true ont he social side of things. Something like a third of the Japanese under 30 are virgins. It's not because they don't have sexual drives (anyone who knows anything about the Japanese porn industry will know this) but because again, ancient traditions combined with the insane expectations of the work-life (company first, always company first) and little spare time has created a situation in which the Japanese don't have a dating culture. It's not really a custom for people to go out on a lot of dates to try and find a suitable partner, because again, going through several different partners without marrying them and settling down is a shameful thing. You're expected to pick a partner, marry them and setup a family. This creates immense social pressure, and many people simply opt to stay single because they lack the skills and the mechanisms to choose a partner, especially since the social norms in Japan are such that approaching a random stranger say at a bar for example is extremely unlikely to happen.
These are all generalizations obviously, I am not Japanese nor have I been there but I know people who've worked and lived there. Obviously not everyone conforms to the aforementioned ideals, but the general point I'm trying to make is that Japan, defeated by the US suffered a massive national disgrace, to which they responded by embracing the ideals of their victors with zeal and dedication of Bushido, and that has created a very prosperous economy with a high-standard of living, but it's come at the cost of the social lives and mental well-being of its inhabitants. Economies can change and adapt fast, but cultural conditioning set forth by thousands of years of customs and history doesn't.
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It's not really a custom for people to go out on a lot of dates to try and find a suitable partner, because again, going through several different partners without marrying them and settling down is a shameful thing. You're expected to pick a partner, marry them and setup a family.
Well ... depending on what you mean by "dates", this is the Western tradition too, abandoned large scale only as recently as the 1970s.
Re: Should we celebrate? Yes! (Score:1)
I've lived in Japan, and in general the poster was correct. And no, you don't need to live somewhere in order to speculate or talk about their culture.
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It goes a bit deeper than that. Funny that you'd mention prosecutors abhor defeat, because the same applies to the police.
This is where the real problem isn't necessarily that 99% of the charged people gets convicted, but that once the police have decided that you're worth interrogating, they will simply keep endlessly interrogating you until you confess.
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In Japan the biggest issue is employers. There is now excellent childcare available, but wages are not high enough and mothers get penalised for taking maternity leave. Many women are prioritising their careers or couples are opting to only have one child because of this.
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Or better still, what is wrong with not having kids?
Japan seems to be coping as well if not better with it's low birth rate than other Western nations.
They're pursuing automation and robotics instead of mass immigration. That seems a little more in line with where technology seems to be going anyways and they get to side step all the issues around mass immigration.
We should also remember that not having kids saves the government a lot of money. Education, crime...
I'm not trying to paint an ideal picture of
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The parent post is wrong in the facts and troll in the opinions.
The statistics show that the more affluent the society, the fewer children are born, and the poorer the people, the more they have lots of kids.
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Insightful? The parent post is wrong in the facts and troll in the opinions. The statistics show that the more affluent the society, the fewer children are born, and the poorer the people, the more they have lots of kids.
The driving concept behind idiocracy.
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Official unemployment numbers are worthless as they don't count people who aren't looking for work. The official unemployment for the US is the lowest in 50 years... but the proportion of the population with jobs is the lowest it's been for about 50 years too. Japan is even worse, with almost an entire generation out of the workforce.
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Japan has a huge aging population, so there are definitely benefits to automation for them.
Sure, but they also have a huge amount of make-work because they have a near-puritanical work ethic.
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Sure, but they also have a huge amount of make-work because they have a near-puritanical work ethic.
I worked in Tokyo for a few years, and it was common to see people still at their desk at 8 or 9pm, yet playing video games (with the audio off) since they had no work to do, but didn't want to leave the office before the boss.
Then when they finally leave, they have a 2 hour subway ride back home.
This is way they don't have time to start a family.
Re:Should we celebrate? (Score:4, Funny)
ShanghaiBill in Tokyo? Whaaaat?
He used to have a lower UID back when he was TokyoBill but sadly his work transferred him.
That's only for desk jobs (Score:2)
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Looks like a troll-bot replaced a human troll here. I miss the human trolls.
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> Also remember, no one ever earns enough to keep their employer afloat. So employed or not, they aren't a sustainable consumer of the product they make.
Boy howdy, you're right. This whole civilization thing is an illusion. I hope I wake up in my cave from this fever dream soon and start hunting bison again...
Although that fella I dreamed up named Henry Ford seemed to think otherwise on the whole "pay your employees well and it helps keep your company afloat" bit. But what did he know eh?
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They can earn money in the service industry, mainly serving elderly. Japan will have enough jobs for decades to come because of the demographic shift. It does mean an increasing distribution of GDP towards the non-working elderly, but because of the relatively high social cohesion it will work out.
Western Europe on the other hand is fucked, it will experience massive white flight as the working population flees to well to do nations with more favourable immigrant streams (Canada, US, Australia, NZ). Ageing
Re:Just remember (Score:4, Informative)
Every employee replaced is one less customer for your products.
Every dollar not spent on that employee is one more dollar spent on something else, generating jobs elsewhere in the economy.
Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]
If noone is earning money, who is going to buy your product?
Is that why countries that have avoided automation, like Ethiopia, Somalia, and Afghanistan, are doing so much better than countries like America, and Western Europe, that have seen their economies destroyed by the "productivity catastrophe"?
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Strangely, the higher automation you see, the higher employment rates. But generally employment rates don't change much over the long-term at all... it's much more affected by short-term events (e.g. wars, housing market crashes, etc.) than anything to do with automation.
That's true historically, geographically, etc.
It's not hard to see why - less workers = cheaper products, more machines = more service and manufacturing of them, greater production = cheaper living costs, etc.
If we could find out how to bu
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If we could find out how to build houses in an automated fashion (and thus make housing cheaper while cutting out an awful lot of labour costs), we could drastically change the world... maybe then rents/mortgages wouldn't be in the "half your wages or more" category.
I can conceive of methods for automating 90% of building a house, but I don't have the capital to develop those ideas and have no interest in sucking up to the people who do because they're assholes.
I suspect a great many people with engineering degrees feel the same way.
Christmas rush 2019 (Score:5, Insightful)
Will Amazon have this in place for next year's Christmas season?
Will Walmart have this in place for Summer 2019?
Will there be any (starter) job that is safe ?
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Amazon will still need humans for now, because Uniqlo has one big advantage over them. Uniqlo only stocks its own products (all clothing) and can package them in a way that the robots can handle. Amazon has to deal with a huge variety of shapes and sizes and packaging types.
It's much easier to make a robot that picks and packs regularly shaped clothing packets (Uniqlo sells a lot of stuff in cardboard stiffened plastic packets for example) than one which can handle arbitrary shapes like a human can.
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It's much easier to make a robot that picks and packs regularly shaped clothing packets (Uniqlo sells a lot of stuff in cardboard stiffened plastic packets for example) than one which can handle arbitrary shapes like a human can.
Walmart has had the clout to dictate packaging to its suppliers for many many years already. Most recently they demanded, and got, RFID chips in all pallets.
Amazon is plenty big enough to start dictating packaging, if they aren't already. The availability of these material handling robots gives them incentive to do just that.
I expect millions of consumer items to be subjected to the same sort of selection pressures that dry goods in grocery stores have been subjected to for decades. There aren't 47 diffe
Look out America (Score:1)
Workers in the Rust Belt states that made Donald Trump President had better watch out for their jobs if manufacturers ever decide to sell those robots in the US. Of course, they'd have to dumb them down quite a bit first.
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It's OK. It's ALL Nancy Pelosi, Obama, gay, liberal, Democrat, anything "other"'s fault. And the new store-bought SCOTUS will insure that it's recorded that way. Forever. A snake could bite a person on their nose and it's all still Obama's fault.....
The "game" is all just rich v. poor, but they've divided (and conquered) the poors by making us fight each other for the bottom.
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Can't disagree.