Maersk turns to drones to track warehouse inventory

When container shipping giant A.P. Møller – Maersk A/S acquired the California third-party logistics company Performance Team in 2020, the move appeared to be simply a quick way for Maersk to expand its warehousing capabilities in North America.

But the Danish corporation wasn’t done yet. It soon began investing in its new unit, expanding the company’s network and upgrading its information technology (IT) capabilities. And today, Performance Team (PT) and its parent company together operate more than 80 facilities with more than 20 million square feet of space throughout the U.S. and Canada. The sites offer both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) solutions for the fulfillment, handling, distribution, and movement of goods.

That level of scale and complexity requires precise inventory management, and in mid-2022, New Jersey-based Maersk North America launched a pilot program using aerial drones at PT sites to boost the accuracy of its inventory counts. It turned to the Swiss startup Verity, which makes drones designed to autonomously navigate warehouses at night, hovering above each pallet, scanning bar codes and taking photographs using onboard cameras. Once the data-collection process is complete, the system transmits the updated numbers to the client facility’s warehouse management system (WMS).

To Maersk, the new approach was an obvious improvement over traditional inventory-counting processes, which required warehouse employees to perform what it characterized as “difficult, repetitive, and tedious tasks,” often at height. The Verity system requires just one day of operator training, Maersk says. On top of that, the electric-powered drones operate on nights or weekends, without the need for overhead lighting, and return to their own battery charging pads when necessary.

100% ACCURACY

As for how the program has been working out, the two companies say the results speak for themselves. Since PT began deploying drones, the inventory-count error rate has dropped from 4% to 0%. After just six months of operating the drones at four sites, Maersk decided to roll out the Verity drones to all of the warehouses in its network that have pallet storage by the end of 2023. And the company has put its money where its mouth is: In March, Verity announced it had raised $32 million in a venture capital round led by Maersk’s investment arm, A.P. Møller Holding.

“As a supply chain integrator, we are constantly looking for new innovations and engineering solutions in our warehouse operations,” Erez Agmoni, senior vice president of innovation and strategic growth for Maersk North America, said in a release. “We wanted to deploy a safer, more accurate, data-driven inventory solution that addressed our decarbonization goals for customers and prevented our workforce from working at heights. Verity’s system has delivered data accuracy, safety, and speed, which makes our warehouse management system stronger, faster, and more effective for customer decision making.”