Our team can demonstrate how you can save money with the only warehouse automation designed for SMB e-commerce

How to calculate the ROI on a Pio

Bringing Pio into your warehouse can make a real reduction in your operational costs by not only saving you money, but by saving time for your entire operation from day one. Looking at our robots it may not be obvious how many things would change, so let’s take a deeper dive into how we think about the ROI for a Pio.

By the numbers

It’s simple to calculate how many employees you’ll need to sustain your operations with Pio (reach out to us for a quote), but it’s less easy to understand what the transformation really means for your operation and associated costs.

To break it down, let’s look at some of the real costs associated with your warehouse:

Headcount

  • With Pio, you can pick and pack up to 5x faster than with manual picking, and process put away and returns more than 2x as fast and more accurately than with traditional methods
  • Depending on your throughput and your current staffing levels, Pio can enable headcount reductions of up to 80% — leading to dramatic savings

Administrative Costs

  • Including but not limited to payroll taxes, insurance plans, and PTO, all business owners know that an employee’s base salary is far from the only expense associated with staffing
  • Hiring is also a costly venture, whether it saps time internally or is a cost by way of an external recruiter
  • Pio’s upfront cost and monthly fee are predictable and don’t require dedicated HR staff to manage
Pio utilizes AutoStore's pioneering cube storage technology in a brand new way, you can pick and pack around 130 order lines per hour with 99.9% accuracy

Software Licensing Fees

  • In addition to the administrative costs associated with headcount, it’s likely that you pay licensing fees for anything from HR software to a WMS instance for each member of your team
  • You don’t need a WMS or any other software to use Pio, just your webstore — so that’s a line item you can completely cross off
  • There’s no charge to add additional users to Pio; anyone on your team can be added or removed as needed by users on-site


Real Estate

  • You need up to 90% LESS space with a Pio. Freeing up your warehouse for other income generating activities.
  • Thanks to the storage density advantages of cube-based storage offered by Pio, you’ll be able to achieve best-in-class efficiency and may even be able to grow within your existing space without needing to move to a larger one


Electricity

  • You won’t need lighting in as much of your warehouse since employees won’t be scouring aisles upon aisles of shelves to pick products manually
  • You’ll also get to save on climate control costs, since the robots and grid can run in the natural ambient temperature of your warehouse
  • Our robots are incredibly energy efficient, using about as much power as a desktop computer — so some of our customers have actually seen a reduction in energy cost simply by turning the lights off and adjusting the thermostat
Not only does the transition to Pio’s cube storage allow you to maximize the warehouse space you already have, but it enables vastly more efficient workflows that can improve quality of life for you and your team.

So about those time savings

While the costs savings are real, the story that the financial side doesn’t tell is how much time you’ll save:

Onboarding & Training

  • It can be difficult and time consuming to bring new people onboard, and nearly impossible to slot someone that’s unfamiliar with your warehouse into your operations if someone gets sick during a busy season
  • Training on Pio only takes minutes — so onboarding is easier than ever and anyone already on your team from other departments can jump in to help during peak activity


Less Downtime

  • If you’re used to printing out order sheets to plan out your picking routes, you’re also probably used to the printer breaking and the team being stuck in a holding pattern until someone gets it working again
  • The Pio system has no single point of failure, ensuring near-constant uptime

    Operations
  • Because of how much faster picking and packing with Pio can be, one employee can complete upwards of 130 order lines per hour, freeing up remaining staff to do more than pick orders all day
  • Handling returns is often a massive time drain for e-commerce businesses, but one Pio customer that sees a return rate of 10-12% says returns used to take the team an entire day to complete — but with Pio it’s now done quickly at the end of the day and “doesn’t require brain power”
  • Want to retain your team, but they need more work to do? Use the opportunity to invest in your people by developing and expanding their skills so that they can take on roles in other parts of the business!

Depending on the size of your team, the cost of your warehouse, and how you choose to pay for your Pio, there are several ways to see a financial ROI, but the transformative workflow that Pio enables will be felt overnight.