One Robot Fleet, Two Sortation Modes: Primary and Secondary Sorting in a Constrained Site

When an international last-mile parcel operator set out to automate sortation, the pressure was coming from people rather than parcels. The operation was fully manual and heavily dependent on labour that was increasingly hard to find and slow to turn around, and missorts kept appearing at volume. Accuracy, uptime and productivity were the targets, and the site had limited floor space to work with, while still needing to handle both primary and secondary sortation for omnichannel Fulfillment.

Unbox deployed UnboxSort as a single system that handles both primary and secondary sortation on one fleet: primary sorting in the first half of the shift, secondary sorting in the second, using the same robots with 104 destinations (bins & racks). The layout was designed so the fleet moves between the two modes with no additional downtime. Installation closed in roughly four weeks, and the system was delivered on a Robots as a Service model, so the operation scales without heavy upfront capital. In a constrained area, one fleet now does the work of two sorting operations, saving significant manpower.

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