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Making a profit in business usually means moving fast. When your business is materials handling and logistics, it means lots of workers hustling down endless corridors to pick products off shelves. But what if instead of moving around, you could just have the material come to you?

That's the idea behind the groundbreaking Kiva Systems Mobile Fulfillment System, or MFS. In warehouses enabled by Kiva, workers don't move from their workstations; instead, products in inventory pods are brought to them by bright orange robots whirring across the floor in a quiet, dizzyingly fast mechanical ballet. A Kiva MFS can double worker productivity, halve energy costs, and allow for real-time order fulfillment, all of which adds up to bottom-line results.

 

For Kiva, wireless connectivity is crucial: the robotic drive units carrying inventory pods are in constant communication with back-end management servers, and a lost Wi-Fi signal can slow the operation down. To ensure this doesn't happen, Kiva Systems has integrated Extricom, the industry standard for robust wireless LAN infrastructure, as a key component of their solution.

Solution Summary

What makes Extricom the right WLAN choice for the Kiva MFS is Channel Blanket architecture. In this unique approach to wireless LAN, the aggregate signal of multiple APs, coordinated by a central switch or switches, creates blankets of wireless coverage.

Within the Channel Blanket, handoffs between APs are eliminated, resulting in continuous connectivity for the highly mobile Kiva robotic drive units. Anywhere within the Extricom Channel Blanket, the drive units are served by multiple APs operating on the same channel, making the system resilient to interference and eliminating the dropped packets associated with other wireless systems.  

 

This seemingly simple choice of WLAN infrastructure has wide-ranging effects for the Kiva MFS. Assured of constant, uniform connectivity, the system can operate at peak efficiency, maximizing worker productivity. In implementations where hundreds of units might be operating at top speed in a 100,000 square foot space, this translates to increased cost-savings, operational flexibility in the face of constantly changing inventory levels, and the ability to start processing orders within seconds of customers clicking the "Submit Order" button of their browser.

The Kiva MFS, with integrated Extricom WLAN, is becoming an industry byword for reliable, scalable automated materials handling. Kiva's customer base has grown to include some of the largest online retailers, including Zappos.com, Diapers.com, Staples, Walgreens, Quiet Logistics, and Gap, Inc.