Robot start-up wants to make delivery services profitable

In the future, employees of the courier services should no longer have to walk down the aisles and look for the ordered products. A kind of big automatic machine takes care of that. “We can accommodate more products in less space, only need one subsequent delivery per day and are faster than the average employee when it comes to issuing the items,” says co-founder Marco Prüglmeier.

The start-up, which is only one year old, has kept the exact way the system works a secret. Now the patents are secured, the market launch is imminent. Interested parties should be able to take a close look at everything from mid-May. Then the Noyes showroom opens in a backyard on Munich’s Leopoldstrasse. The Handelsblatt has already looked around there.

Intelligent robots bring the right box to the distribution point

From the outside, the system looks like a large white closet with one open compartment on each level. As soon as an order is received, the boxes with the required products are driven to this issuing point on pallets. The employees then only have to follow the instructions on a display and collect bags of crisps, bottles of drinks and packets of pasta.

The products are stowed very compactly within the system. The exhibit is only three levels high and has no cover at the top to give a glimpse of how it works. On each level you can see pallets with plastic crates lined up next to and behind one another, only one of the twelve compartments is free and is used to maneuver the pallets.

The system works like a sliding puzzle in which you have to put numbers from one to 15 in the correct order, while only one area is free to move numbers. The founders also copied the company name from the inventor of the game, Noyes Palmer Chapman.

In this case, the puzzle is solved by intelligent robots that move on an intermediate level under the crates that can lift and move pallets. The more robots maneuver per level, the faster the operation runs.

Speed ​​is the all-important criterion for Quick Commerce. Therefore, in order to meet the requirements of potential customers, Noyes also had to develop the “motorway system”.

A detailed analysis of orders has shown that 20 percent of the items are ordered very often, while the other 80 percent are rarely ordered, says Marco Prüglmeier. For the frequently ordered items called “fast sellers”, there are now levels where a whole row of pallets is missing. As a result, these products arrive at the output tray even faster.

The promise: 1300 articles on 50 square meters and never sold out

With the optimized concept, Noyes wants to accommodate a range of 1,300 items in around 50 square meters. In the overall package, the 700 to 800 modules and 36 robots required for this cost 400,000 euros. The system should manage with just one delivery per day and can be expanded as required.

According to Noyes, two express delivery services have already signed contracts, and one already has a test system. The Handelsblatt asked Gorillas and Flink whether they could also become profitable without automated warehouses and whether they were planning automation from a certain size. Gorillas did not want to comment on the details of its own storage system “for competitive reasons”.

Flink says it will “take quite a while” before automation in inner-city warehouses becomes economically attractive. The company is “still at the beginning of process optimization,” said a spokesman. “We are currently very satisfied with our teams at the locations and can react flexibly to product range expansions at any time and do not have to keep an eye on any limitations through automation.”

Noyes founder Prüglmeier says: “After 22 years in logistics, I believe that no quick commerce provider can achieve profitability manually.” An important parameter is the sum of the items per purchase. However, this can only be increased by a larger assortment – and without automation you would not be able to accommodate that in the small storage areas.

Spiegelburg adds: The companies also made too many mistakes manually. Customers get the wrong products, too much or too little. “It costs companies a lot of money to generously excuse faulty deliveries with credit notes.” The Noyes system includes control mechanisms such as scales and a scan wristband.

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The Noyes founders worked for car manufacturer BMW for many years. Mechanical engineer Prüglmeier (50) built up the “Logistics Innovation Lab” there over the course of 22 years. Industrial engineer Spiegelburg (44) has been responsible for finance and controlling for logistical issues for more than 18 years.

By early 2023, Noyes wants to develop a miniature department store with Viessmann

The duo sees many other possible uses for their storage system. Aaron Spiegelburg puts the market that Noyes can serve at 8.6 billion euros by 2030, of which three billion are attributable to quick commerce.

Noyes talks to industrial customers about storage solutions directly on the assembly line, and the space-saving system could also be of interest to food retailers.

Concepts for pick-up stations are being developed with parcel services and online retailers, where customers can have goods handed out themselves. And Noyes is also thinking about small self-service department stores.

Joachim Schlichtig finds this idea “intriguing”. The head of technology at Viessmann refrigeration technology is working with Noyes on a solution for refrigerated goods. The first prototype for a self-service shop is to be presented at the beginning of 2023. “You could set up the Noyes-Viessmann store in every corner of a city and make yourself independent of the Edekas and Lidls, which I have to get to first,” says Schlichtig.

For the current year, however, Noyes is initially planning to install at least 30 storage systems without cooling. The number of employees is to increase from the current 42 to 70 to 80. Theoretically, customers can set up the systems themselves. “The modules can be set up as easily as an Ikea shelf,” says Prüglmeier. The robots aligned themselves automatically.

The question remains what the delivery services should do in the future if a robot goes on strike: “In the worst case, another robot will simply push the defective robot out,” says Prüglmeier. Noyes should have been informed about the error via the cloud connection and sent a replacement.

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