Locus Robotics and Kimball Midwest have won the 2026 Supply Chain Excellence Awards USA prize for Best Use of Robotics, judging a three-site autonomous mobile robot rollout that has already handled more than 13 million picks and roughly a million putaway lines inside the industrial distributor's national network.
A three-site AMR footprint built on LocusONE
The award, presented on September 15 at Union Station in Dallas, recognises Kimball Midwest's deployment of more than 100 Locus autonomous mobile robots orchestrated by the LocusONE platform across its distribution centres in Columbus, Ohio; the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas; and Reno, Nevada. Locus supplies the fleet under a Robots-as-a-Service model, letting the MRO distributor scale robots up and down as SKU counts and order profiles change.
Kimball Midwest kicked off the program in Columbus in January 2024 and expanded to all three facilities within 14 months, using the same LocusONE workflow for both picking and putaway. "Using one robotics platform for both picking and putaway allows managers to reallocate associates as priorities shift throughout the day," Steve Good, director of operations at Kimball Midwest, said in the announcement.
45% picking lift, doubled putaway rates, sub-one-year ROI
According to Locus Robotics, picking productivity climbed 45%, from about 110 lines per hour to more than 160, while putaway rates roughly doubled from around 30 to 91-96 lines per hour. Onboarding time for new associates fell from about two weeks to a matter of minutes or hours, and the operator says the deployment paid back in under a year. "Kimball Midwest had a clear objective: increase capacity without compromising service," Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk said in the same release.
Second Best Use of Robotics award for Locus in a row
The win is Locus Robotics' second consecutive Best Use of Robotics honour at the Supply Chain Excellence Awards USA after taking the 2025 prize alongside dental supplier Dental City. The company says its fleet has now completed more than seven billion units picked worldwide for retail, 3PL, healthcare and industrial customers.
Elsewhere in warehouse robotics this week, Geekplus opened its first European Innovation Lab in Dusseldorf, while Toyota expanded its Locus deployment via a separate 436-robot Geekplus rollout. The Kimball Midwest program also lands as MRO distributors face rising pressure to scale fulfilment against tight labour markets, mirroring the wider industrial AMR trend TechCrunch chronicled at IMTS 2026.
Reporting based on coverage from Business Wire, RoboticsTomorrow and Yahoo Finance.