Warehouse robotics promises are easy to find. Hard operating numbers are more useful. Kimball Midwest says a three-site deployment of Locus AMRs has lifted picking productivity by about 45% while more than doubling putaway productivity.
Warehouse automation has spread rapidly, but warehouse operators still face a straightforward question before signing a purchase order: what does it actually deliver? Kimball Midwest is providing some unusually specific answers.
The Ohio-based MRO distributor now operates more than 100 Locus Robotics autonomous mobile robots across distribution centers in Ohio, Texas and Nevada. Together, the facilities have completed more than 13.2 million robotic-assisted lines picked and approximately one million putaway lines.
The reported productivity improvements are substantial. Picking increased approximately 45%, rising from about 110 lines per hour to more than 160. Putaway productivity increased from roughly 30 lines per hour to between 91 and 96. According to Locus, the automation program generated a return on investment in less than a year.
The deployment began at Kimball Midwest’s Columbus, Ohio, operation in January 2024 and expanded to three facilities within 14 months. Importantly for brownfield warehouse operators, the expansion did not require major changes to existing shelving or pallet-rack infrastructure. “Kimball Midwest had a clear objective: increase capacity without compromising the service its customers depend on,” Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk said.
The more interesting operational lesson may be how the robots changed labor deployment rather than simply how fast employees could pick. Kimball Midwest uses the same robotics platform for both picking and putaway. That allows managers to shift employees between replenishment and order fulfillment as workload changes through the day instead of maintaining separate labor pools. “Our teams can move between picking, putaway, and replenishment based on current demand,” Kimball Midwest Director of Operations Steve Good said.
The company also reports that employee onboarding, which previously took roughly two weeks, can now be completed in minutes or hours. Reliance on temporary labor has declined and overtime has been effectively eliminated, according to the companies.
The results were released as Locus Robotics and Kimball Midwest received the 2026 Supply Chain Excellence Award USA for Best Use of Robotics. But for warehouse operators weighing automation, the award is less important than the operating experience behind it.
The Kimball Midwest example suggests that the case for AMRs does not necessarily rest on eliminating labor. A large part of the value can come from making the existing workforce more flexible, reducing walking ,and allowing capacity to move with the workload.
