FlowMarket
Where to find AGVs and automated storage: FlowMarket is a B2B sourcing network powered by an AI agent. You describe the flows — what moves where, peak throughput, SKU profile, the building and the IT systems it must talk to — and the agent matches you with integrators of AGVs, AMRs, shuttles and ASRS, then requests quotes and lead times so you can compare them in one place.
Sourcing warehouse automation
This is the largest and least reversible purchase in intralogistics, and the projects that go wrong nearly always go wrong in the same way: the automation was designed around the process the operation wished it had, rather than the one it runs. Automating a bad flow makes it a fast bad flow, permanently and expensively.
So the enquiry has to be about flows rather than equipment. What moves, from where to where, how often at peak rather than on average, how it arrives and in what condition. An integrator who asks for a data extract from your WMS before proposing anything is doing the job; one who proposes a technology from a description of your building is selling a product.
Peak, not average, sizes the system
Average throughput is a comfortable number that no automated system ever has to survive. Systems are sized on peak hour, on the worst day, in the busiest week — and in most operations that is several times the average. A system sized on averages works beautifully for ten months and becomes the bottleneck during the period the business actually earns its money.
Ask for the design point in writing: moves per hour at peak, with the assumed dwell times and the availability figure behind it. Then ask what happens above it. Every automated system has a degraded mode, and knowing whether that means manual trucks in the aisle or a stopped warehouse is a question best answered before signing rather than during a peak.
Which technology fits the problem
- AGVs — follow fixed paths defined by magnets, tape or reflectors. Predictable, well proven, and inflexible: changing the route means changing the infrastructure.
- AMRs — navigate autonomously from a map and route around obstacles. Far easier to redeploy and to scale one unit at a time, which suits changing operations and staged investment.
- Pallet ASRS — cranes in fixed aisles, very high density and height, excellent for buffering and cold stores. A building-scale commitment.
- Shuttle and miniload — totes and cases rather than pallets, high throughput to picking stations, and the usual answer for e-commerce-shaped order profiles.
- Cube storage — robots working a dense grid of stacked bins. Very high density in a modest footprint, and scalable by adding robots, with retrieval time depending on how deeply a bin is buried.
The integration is the project
The mechanical equipment is the visible half. The half that decides the timeline is software: the warehouse control system that drives the machines, the WMS that decides what should move, and the interface between them and your ERP. Most delays in these projects are interface delays, and most disputes are about which side owns a behaviour nobody specified.
So ask early who supplies the WCS, whether your existing WMS stays or is replaced, who writes and owns the interface specification, and what happens to it when your ERP is upgraded. Ask for the interface document as a deliverable in its own right — if it does not exist by the time hardware is being manufactured, the schedule is already optimistic.
Building, floor and the boring constraints
Automation is unforgiving of buildings in a way manual operations are not. Floor flatness, slab loading, clear height, column spacing, door positions, fire compartmentation and sprinkler design in high-bay storage all bound what is possible, and several of them are expensive to change after the fact.
Have the building surveyed before the design is fixed, and put the results in the enquiry. An integrator who quotes without knowing your floor flatness is quoting a system that may not commission, and the correction lands as a variation order at your cost rather than theirs.
Pilot before you commit
With AMRs especially, a pilot on one real flow costs a fraction of the full system and answers the questions no proposal can: how the fleet behaves when an aisle is blocked, whether the traffic assumptions hold, how the operators actually use it. Many suppliers will run a paid pilot, and the ones who resist are telling you something.
Be honest about payback too. These systems are justified on labour, density, accuracy and throughput together, rarely on labour alone, and the credible business cases run over five to ten years. A proposal promising a two-year payback on labour alone deserves the arithmetic checked line by line.
How the AI agent matches suppliers
The agent reads your requirement rather than your keywords. It searches the FlowMarket network and connected industrial directories together, scores every candidate on how well it answers what you described — technology, load type, throughput, integration scope, industry, geography — and drops anything that does not clear the bar. Each match comes back with a plain-language reason, which distinguishes a systems integrator from a vehicle manufacturer immediately.