SDI and Kindred Partner to Automate Retail Fulfillment Operations and Augment Human Labor

LOS ANGELES and SAN FRANCISCO – Jan. 13, 2020 – SDI announced a partnership with Kindred to integrate its materials handling systems and technology with Kindred’s artificial intelligence (AI) pick and place robotic solutions. The partnership will help customers meet increasing retail fulfillment demands throughout the entire year, including peak seasons.  

SDI’s Distribution Center Management System (DCMS) software application incorporates all parts of DC operations, from the basic to the most complex waving and management solutions for retail, wholesale, fulfillment and e-commerce industries. The solution is scalable, easily supported, and the tools allow the DC manager to get the performance from the hardware and software solutions provided.  

“We are really excited about this partnership,” Krish Nathan, SDI CEO, said. “As an integrator, we’re eager to be able to offer such a great product to our clients and to partner with an innovative company such as Kindred.” 

Warehouse associates work collaboratively with Kindred’s SORT to sort items into individual customer orders quickly and accurately. The robots arrive ready to operate, with minimal associate training, and adapt to each distribution center’s unique requirements. Kindred’s machine learning algorithms also improve robot performance over time for the entire fleet. 

“At Kindred, we pride ourselves on helping our clients to meet increased demand with greater efficiency and to future-proof their operations through automation,” said Joe Nentwig, VP Sales at Kindred. “Partnering with integrators such as SDI greatly helps us realize client KPIs for our entire install base.” 

SORT pick and place robots utilize CORE/AutoGrasp™, a robotics artificial intelligence platform that identifies items to pick, place and sort into complete end-customer orders. Kindred’s CORE/AutoGrasp™ combines AI-powered machine vision, grasping and manipulation algorithms that handle a range of merchandise, including deformable items such as polybagged items.  

Kindred uses cutting-edge AI research and human-in-the-loop data methodology to continuously improve robot capabilities so that picking becomes smarter, faster and more accurate over time. Kindred SORT robots have picked more than 100 million units in production to date. 

ABOUT SDI 

SDI has been offering turnkey materials handling systems and solutions to brands all over the world since 1977. They are specialists in apparel sortation and unit handling, consulting, engineering and design, systems and software integration. SDI integrates various cutting-edge technologies such as Joey Pouch Sorter and Enzo AGV and is the manufacturer of SORTRAK G4 -- a bomb bay-style unit sorter for apparel. 

Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, SDI is a multinational organization with operations around the world, servicing both international and domestic clients. SDI currently has more than 400 Distribution Center systems installed worldwide. Learn more at www.SDI.SYSTEMS 

ABOUT KINDRED 

Kindred is a robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops robots to solve real-world problems. Its mission is to enhance the lives of human workers with the power of AI robotics. Kindred’s cutting-edge technology is the foundation of a number of proprietary platforms, including CORE/AutoGrasp™, developed to operate robots autonomously in dynamic environments. Its team of scientists, engineers, and business operators have set a new standard for reinforcement learning for robots. The company is co-located in San Francisco and Toronto. For more information, visit www.kindred.ai.