Rick Cohen
Rick Cohen is an American businessman who built C&S Wholesale Grocers into the largest US grocery wholesaler and founded Symbotic, a warehouse automation company that began as CasePick Systems in 2007.
What they did and why it matters
Cohen approached warehouse automation as an operator first, and Symbotic grew out of the problems of running large grocery distribution centers. Symbotic's system uses autonomous robots, storage structures, and software to receive, store, and build mixed pallets of cases for stores, work that was traditionally done by people driving forklifts and picking cases by hand. Major retailers have adopted it for regional distribution centers. For case-picking and store replenishment operations, his work shows how automation targets labor cost, storage density, and accuracy in building store-ready pallets.
Sources
- Richard B. Cohen (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
- Building the warehouse of the future (Wharton Magazine) magazine.wharton.upenn.edu