A look at how smart automation and collaboration ensure that components reach engineers when and where they are needed.
Engineers, procurement teams, and hobbyists demand rapid access to a vast range of components, from minuscule resistors to large power supplies, often across multiple projects simultaneously. In this inherently complex environment, distributors face the dual challenges of high Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) diversity and ever-increasing order volumes, and even minor delays or errors can cascade into costly setbacks for customers.
With continuous new product introductions (NPIs) and engineers seeking faster development cycles, the demands on warehouses have never been higher. Furthermore, orders can range from a single reel of resistors to large shipments with dozens of different items, each with unique handling requirements.
To keep pace with evolving market demands, distributors must continuously enhance their distribution operations. By combining robotics, advanced automation, and human expertise, they can better adapt to fluctuating order volumes, diverse SKUs, and tight project timelines, delivering the speed, accuracy, and reliability that customers require.
Continuous automation: scaling with demand
Mouser Electronics serves more than 650,000 customers across 223 countries or territories, supplying over 1.2 million SKUs from 1,200+ manufacturers. To ensure its customer base has reliable access to the latest innovations, Mouser deploys a continuous program of automation investment, integrating new systems to keep pace with growing order volumes and SKU diversity.
Since 2016, a range of new additions have been deployed, each carefully aligned with operational needs, to help enhance throughput, capacity, and service quality. This responsive approach ensures the distribution centre can support rapid NPIs, prototyping, and high-volume production shipments while maintaining accuracy and reliability.
At the core of this evolving system is a mix of advanced technologies, each chosen and scaled to meet specific operational requirements:
- Vertical Lift Modules (VLMs): these goods-to-person (GTP) systems bring components directly to Mouser employees, supporting the efficient picking of small and medium-sized SKUs. To keep up with changing product mixes, VLMs are continually being expanded and modified. Mouser has the largest deployment of these systems, with 187 units in use worldwide (Figure 1)
- AutoStore systems: optimised for medium-velocity items, these modular automated storage units maximise space utilisation while supporting rapid and precise picking. Added in 2021, Mouser’s AutoStore has 76,000 bins, 120 robots, 40 pick ports, and nine replenishment ports
- Perfect Pick AS/RS and sortation loops: designed for order consolidation, these systems streamline the assembly of multi-item shipments, enhancing speed and accuracy while maintaining flexibility
- Advanced packaging and conveyors: automated weighing, print-and-apply, and case-forming systems reduce manual handling and maintain consistency across a wide range of order sizes
- Warehouse control and software integration: custom platforms manage workflows, coordinate robotics, and provide visibility into inventory and order status, enabling the operation to respond in real time to changing order profiles
Mouser’s approach emphasises a continuously evolving system where new technologies are carefully integrated to boost throughput, capacity, and service quality while minimising operational disruption. Over the past decade, the team has consistently refined warehouse operations, optimising packing, order pulling, and consolidation. Just as engineers continually seek new opportunities to innovate and push the boundaries of design, Mouser also pursues continuous improvement in its distribution operations, ensuring that as inventory expands, order complexity increases, or new challenges arise, customers can rely on fast, accurate, and uninterrupted component delivery.
Precision and agility: the human-automation edge
Nevertheless, automation alone cannot solve the complexities of electronics warehousing, and Mouser has built a system that enables humans and machines to work in tandem, allowing for rapid, accurate, and flexible order fulfilment. This synergy enables the company to strike a balance between system optimisation and adaptability, benefiting its customers.
The core principle is that automation accelerates repetitive, high-volume processes, while employees provide oversight, problem-solving, and the flexibility to handle complex or high-value items. Human input is integral to the success of GTP-enhanced systems, and Mouser’s team helps design workstations, refine software interfaces, and optimise workflows, ensuring automation is efficient, ergonomic, and adaptable. Continuous investment in automation, seamless human-machine collaboration, and agile workflows ensure that orders are accurate, fast, and reliable, even in the face of emerging challenges. Whether managing small prototype orders or large multi-item shipments, Mouser’s system supports engineers and supply chain partners with the confidence to explore, iterate, and create without compromise.
The results speak for themselves. When Mouser first added automated packaging and shipping systems around eight years ago, the distribution centre shipped roughly 8,000 orders per day. Today, with the same number of employees, it handles an average of 25,000 orders daily. Many orders can be picked, consolidated, and packaged, and are ready to ship in as little as 15 minutes. Same-day shipping remains near 100% for time-sensitive orders, even as order volumes and SKU diversity continue to grow.
Powering innovation without limits
In industries ranging from automotive and consumer technology to medical devices and industrial automation, engineers and innovators continually push the boundaries of what is possible. Mouser mirrors that energy in its distribution operations, ensuring supply chains never become a bottleneck. Within its cutting-edge 1.5-million-square-foot distribution centre, automation and human skill combine seamlessly to meet the market’s latest demands.
This scale and sophistication allow the company to absorb complexity, maintain accuracy, and respond flexibly to fluctuating order volumes and diverse SKUs. By taking the hassle out of electronics supply, Mouser enables its customers to focus on the work that drives innovation – designing, prototyping, and bringing new products to market.
About the author:
Martina Drimala, VP EMEA Customer Service, Mouser Electronics
This article originally appeared in the Jan/Feb 26 issue of Procurement Pro.
