Thank you, everyone. Welcome now to the management panel's presentation portion of our 2024 Investor Day. Welcome to our online audience. Thank you for joining us all today. We've just had a fantastic tour in the lovely Central Florida heat. We had a tour of Walmart's Brooksville Distribution Center, a fantastic facility that Walmart has run with excellence for many years, and now is a key place for automation that's really gonna transform the supply chain in very dramatic ways. I hope you all saw that today. I heard from some of you you were amazed at the amount of progress we've made in the past year in terms of expanding our facility, our operations there. I heard from many of you, your excitement about BreakPack.
That is the first extensive tour we've provided of our BreakPack system, something we're very proud of, and I think many of you saw how powerfully transformative BreakPack will be for our customers. You hear us talk a lot about having a nearly $23 billion contracted committed backlog. That is such a big number it's hard to get your arms around. So we thought we would try to take a moment and show you what $23 billion of contracted committed backlog actually looks like. So here we were in 2027 with seven operational systems. And then you just dialed in for our March quarter that we reported Monday night, and we told you about our now 18 operational systems that are up and running across the United States.
We also talked about our 37 systems that are in the process of deployment and now 38 with the implementation we're starting this quarter for GreenBox. Next, let's talk about our non-GreenBox backlog. Each one of these dots represents a site that we will begin to deploy in the next several years. Many of those points are actually multiple spots of systems that are going to be deployed at single locations. Finally, you've heard about our BreakPack backlog. There's a little bit about what BreakPack looks like. Now, don't hold me to these sites. These are potential sites. But what I want you to capture is the number of dots reflected here is representative of both the number of systems that we will deploy under our existing GreenBox contract and also our global ambitions that we share with GreenBox.
So this is quite representative of how we will grow our footprint. Okay. So that's with nine customers. Nine. That's it. And we're still gonna add one to two new customers per year. But this is just our existing nine customers today. But you always hear Rick talk about how important braggingly happy customers are. Let me share with you why that is so important. If we build out all of the opportunities we have today with these nine customers, well, I would have to put up another four to five times the number of spots on this map with those existing nine customers.
So that brings me to summarizing what this whole day is about. This whole session of presentation's all gonna be about how we have this unbelievably huge opportunity, and we are building scale in our innovation, in our messaging, in our operations, and in our people to be able to meet this opportunity. That's what we want you to take away from today. That's the message that you're gonna hear from every single panel. Okay? So now, who is the man that had this vision from the very beginning? I'm thrilled to be able to introduce our Chairman, Founder, and Chief Executive Officer, Rick Cohen. Rick has the unique distinction of having run warehouses his entire life. But before I introduce Rick, I'll very quickly just hit the outline here.
We're gonna talk about the invention of the supply chain, the sharing of it, delivering it, and empowering our people to make that all happen. All right. Sorry about that. Back to Rick. So Rick founded Symbotic in 2016. He invested over $700 million of his own money to fund the company, and he built Symbotic to where we are today. The building continues. So Rick, would you please kick off our presentation for Investor Day?
Thanks, everybody. Thanks for making the trip today, and thanks for letting us show off our really cool toys. Somebody asked me what I was most excited about, and I was speechless 'cause I'm excited about everything. I love the BreakPack. I every time I'm in the site, I'm kinda like when you see it for the first time. So I still very vividly remember five years ago, the original Walmart system that we had in Brooksville was two outbound cells. It didn't work very well. We convinced Walmart that we could do a better job. Today, you saw 13 outbound cells, five or six FLIBS, four or five inbound cells in a BreakPack system. That system may be the biggest automated warehouse system ever designed for retail stores. So it's, it's pretty amazing.
But what I'm most excited about is that when I walk around with the Symbotic team, it's like, "Oh, we could do this better. We could do that better." And then this team typically goes back and a week or two later say, "Here's a drawing. We were thinking about this. We were thinking about that." The way you should think about Symbotic is, the analogy I use is we're just Amazon selling books right now, and we're Sam Walton's 5 and 10. And did anybody know how big these things were gonna be? I don't think so. But did they have a vision about if you do great things and you have braggingly happy customers, how big they could be? That's where we are. We are driving the cost of running a warehouse lower and lower and lower.
The cost of our systems is coming down as we do it. With the team that we've assembled, we have a lot of new people. You're gonna see half of this team has been here less than two years. But what's happening is that the tech community, even more so than the retail community or the people that would buy our systems, there's quite a buzz about what we're doing because we are combining AI, we are combining vision, we're combining machine learning, we're combining very cool technology in one place, and it's practical. You can actually build it and use it, and we're not doing military stuff. We're doing stuff that you can publish about, talk about, and write about. The pace at which we are accelerating, so what you saw today was the Brooksville system.
In the next year, we're gonna have 10 of those systems up and running. Each one of those systems is hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. That's how fast we're accelerating. From three years ago, four years ago, three years ago, I guess we were $250 million in sales. So the pace of acceleration, what I'm excited about, and also kinda holding onto my seat is, the pace of technological acceleration, the pace of adoption from Symbotic is accelerating. The pace of growth and sales for us is accelerating. The talent pace is accelerating. And that's what I'm most excited about. What I wanna say is that this will be the slowest sales year that this company has for the next 50 years. There is just so much demand for what we're doing. And we're actually very patient.
A lot of times, people said, "Well, what have you done with the first systems?" In some cases, I've given people their money back. I said, "I can't support this system. It didn't work. We upgraded the bots." And so we now have all bots going forward are on the same platform. We made some announcements on Monday about earnings, how we're cleaning up so you don't have to support bad technology. And that allows us to go faster on the new technology. Our ability to scale systems and grow faster and faster and faster is critical. And what's critical for us is we actually have to keep up with the technology at a lightning pace in order to support the build-out.
So without further ado, I'd like to spend some time for you all getting to know the team that we've assembled here at Symbotic, how proud I am of them. And this is a rockstar team of technologists, mixed in with a good sampling of geniuses and doing stuff that, quite frankly, there's a moat around what we're doing. People say, "Well, who else is doing what you're doing?" And the answer is, "No one." What we did, I used to say to the early team in the first couple of years when I was putting in a couple hundred million dollars and say, "Is this gonna work?" And I would also say, "Are you guys just really slow or do you not know what you're doing or is this really hard?" It's one of the three.
What I found out is it's really expensive and it's really hard. But they did know what they were doing, and as a result, we have this unbelievable platform. And I said last year, I think at this meeting, we think there's no goal that we should have less than moving every box in the world. And what you saw in BreakPack is mini bots. And what I told the groups, a couple groups I was with, is what we've created is the iOS, the platform for integrating new technology into all forms of robots. So we have the big SymBot, which is a 250 lbs, 20-mile-an-hour bot. We have a mini bot, which is about 50 lbs. But we could make a bot the size of an iPhone.
I mean, we have the technology and the skill set to do that if we wanted to move medical devices or we wanted to move stuff. So the future of what I say is we're just selling books. We don't know what we're gonna sell. We don't know how big the market is. But we do know that we are so much lower cost at moving boxes than any other person-based or, or, or automation-based system anywhere in the world. And as we get the price of these systems down lower and we get them more reliable, which is the journey we're on, there's no reason for anybody to wanna buy any other system. And I think we can go in places where temperature or labor or a million other things will affect us. And so that's what I wanted to show you today. The journey is just beginning.
We've doubled every year for the last three years, and I think we're just gonna keep growing at that rate for quite a while. And we've assembled a team that can actually do that. So without further ado, I'll turn it back to Jeff. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Rick. I really am excited for you to get to know even better more of our management team here at Symbotic. So let me begin by introducing our Chief Strategy Officer, Bill Boyd, as Symbotic's Chief Strategy Officer, Bill is responsible for planning and directing various operational, financial, and administrative activities for Symbotic. He has more than 12 years of extensive experience in distribution and logistics, in part at C&S and at Symbotic. And Rick or excuse me, Bill was involved in the original investments that led to the formation of Symbotic. So he has been with us since day one. Bill?
Thanks very much, Jeff. Thank you all for coming. Thanks for everybody who's online with us today. I recognize that we've promised you panels, and now we've had three individual people standing up here. We're really gonna get there, I promise. But we're gonna spend about two more minutes just talking about the way we frame innovation before we get there. We look at innovation on three axes. We look at creativity and innovation, how we invest in it, and then focusing always through a lens of our customers. If we go to the next slide, as we talk about, actually, I wanna go. Yes, this one. Thank you. As we talk about innovation here, one of our engineers actually gave me this slide, which I'm sure he shamelessly stole somewhere else.
So, we'll come back to that, and I'm sure there'll be a copyright somebody wants to talk to us about. But what we look at is creativity. Enough creativity is not enough to actually fuel true innovation. We try to foster creativity throughout our organization, but there also has to be a purpose for that creativity. We look at that through a customer lens. How are we solving the problems of our customers? How are we actually solving something that in the real world will make a difference? And we focus our energy there and trying to get that nexus between a creative idea and a purposeful idea and really make innovation that works. We do this primarily in three categories.
We look at this as investing in our core technology, AI, and the machine learning that we're gonna talk about very shortly here, looking at it, as I've said we've said, through making our customers' products, the systems that are out there, better for our customers and in making our systems more efficient to install, to use, and driving costs down. As one of the markers that folks like to talk about when looking at your, your ability to innovate often is your ability to patent your, your innovations. This is one measure for us. But clearly, as we've looked at solving problems, we've been able to solve problems in a way that has allowed us to get patent coverage for some very important innovation.
We continue to drive forward in all of our thinking about how do we make our systems better with how can we actually protect what we're creating and the moat that Jeff talked about earlier. And with that, rather than having you listen to me talk more about it, I'm gonna bring up some of my friends. So if you all could join me on stage. Thanks very much, gentlemen. Just as a by way of very quick introduction, I'm gonna start on this end. Ted Macdonald is our Symbotic Fellow. Ted directs several Symbotic advanced technology teams overseeing feature design and system engineering, as well as control and software architecture. In the 10+ years Ted has been at Symbotic, he's helped design and implement the core architecture of the company's mobile robot system. Next to him, Cristian Mori. Christian's a Senior Vice President Hardware.
Cristian's responsible for developing technologies and products that provide breakthrough solutions for Symbotic's customers. Prior to joining Symbotic, Cristian led deployment and system standardization at Rivian as a Director of Industrial Automation and Control Advanced Development. Next, Teddy Ort. Teddy is a Senior Director of Robot Perception and Artificial Intelligence. Teddy leads the SymBot software group and is responsible for the seamless execution of thousands of pick-and-place tasks per hour across the Symbotic fleet SymBot fleet, excuse me, as you saw today. Prior to joining Symbotic, Teddy worked with the Toyota Research Institute where he worked on localization and mapping techniques for autonomous vehicles.
We've got a special guest who didn't put on the screen because we dragged him up here late today. So than k you, Aftab. Aftab Khan joined Symbotic back in November of last year. He's SVP of Core Hardware Engineering. He brings 20+ y ears of experience with automotive powertrains to our team. His last role was at Stellantis Head of Powertrain Electrical and Electrical Components. So let's actually get to you guys speaking rather than me. We talked on in our conference call on Monday about TSR, Teddy. If maybe you could lead us off by taking a little bit of a deeper dive into what TSR is and why it's important to our system.
Absolutely, Bill. So in the Symbotic system, the router is responsible for coordinating the movement of all the SymBots in the fleet. In our previous version of the router, it was called the beltway router because it pretty much operated like a beltway. So the robots would plan for a short distance ahead, and they would essentially have to merge onto the beltway just like a human driver would by waiting for a gap. Now, this is a simple solution. It worked pretty well, but it wasn't optimal. Recently, the team has been able to deploy the TSR, or Time-Space Reservation Router. And for those of you in the room, this is the router that we saw running in the deployment center that we saw today. This actually works by planning the entire trajectory from where the bot is to its destination in both time and space.
It allows the router to interleave these trajectories much more efficiently and that improves both the throughput and the reliability of the overall system. Now, one other point that I think the TSR really illustrates well is how extensible the system is. So with some automation solutions, once you install it, they essentially stay stagnant. On the other hand, with autonomous robots, we're able to install a software update like TSR over the air. The bots wake up the next morning, and they have a performance boost, which is a huge benefit for our customers.
Thanks, Teddy. That's great. And one of the other pieces we talk a lot about is not just software but AI and how that actually works. Could you talk a little bit about how we leverage into AI and how this fits in what we do?
Sure. So, Rick had mentioned that we've been improving the hardware of the bots recently to make sure that all of our bots will one day include vision capabilities and not just the cameras and the 3D sensors but even the GPUs that are required for us to be able to run onboard perception algorithms on the bots themselves. This enables us to do things like estimate the pose or position of a case in the structure. And it also allows us to identify a case. And this works similar to the way a facial recognition algorithm would look at a picture of a person and then tag that picture with the name of the person. So similarly, the robots can actually look at a picture of a case and then identify its SKU and associate that with the database.
So these types of algorithms are quite a bit different than, for example, a routing algorithm, which is optimization-based. Those types of problems are very structured, and so they're much more suitable for optimization types of algorithms when you're looking at a million different cases in a chaotic warehouse environment. The SKU mix that you're looking at, it could change every day. You would need a team of engineers to be constantly maintaining and updating the algorithms to be able to handle that. On the other hand, when we move more towards these data-driven and AI-powered algorithms, they actually improve as they get more data, and they adapt on their own as they learn, and they get better. So they're much more suitable for dealing with these very high-volume chaotic problems that we're facing in the warehouse setting.
Great. Thank you. You mentioned you mentioned vision in there. And obviously, being vision-enabled, we've talked for a while about what that could mean for us. Could you spend a little bit of time talking about what it has enabled us to do, in terms of teleops and being able to operate remotely?
Yeah. So that's another capability that having vision on the bots has enabled. So as you could see here in the video, this is an example of what a teleoperation looks like. So in those rare scenarios where a bot approaches a case and has an issue picking it, previously, we might require some human intervention where a person working in the warehouse has to go over and help fix the case. We now have a remote operations center where teleoperators can take control of the bots, use the vision on the bot to see what the bot sees, and fix that problem scenario.
Fantastic. Again, about that. I think that builds off of your extensibility point from earlier. Thank you.
Exactly.
You don't get to go far. We're gonna come back to you, I'm sure. But, Ted, maybe you could take us through a little bit on carpooling. We talked about it a lot while we were in the building today, pick faces and multiple cases in multiple directions. Why is carpooling important to us, and can you help us understand what's going on?
Yeah. So one of the key metrics that we look at is how many cases can each robot move every hour. And it's a huge driver of system cost and throughput capacity. And one way we can do that is make the robots drive faster and more efficiently. And Teddy covered that with the routing algorithms that we work on. Another lever that we have to pull is to move more than one case at a time, and that we call that carpooling. Now, we've been doing inbound carpooling for quite some time. It's a lot easier to do when you're underloading a uniform pallet. But only recently have we been able to deliver cases carpooled to outbound, which is a much harder problem because we need to deliver cases in particular sequences to meet the outbound demand on these mixed SKU pallets.
Just now, we're beginning the production deployment of our first outbound carpooling-enabled software. Starting with percentage of our transactions today, we hope to grow that over time. And that's a huge just efficiency multiplier for the bots.
Yeah. And now I wanna go a different direction. So we talked about multiple cases. We've talked about getting bigger and, and being able to do more transactions with more items. You are also one of the original architects of BreakPack. Can you talk to us about how we're getting smaller? Why BreakPack is important here?
So, everyone in the room got to see the BreakPack system here in Brooksville. This is our proof-of-concept system that we're basically able to demonstrate the whole system coming together and functioning and hitting good throughput rates. Through that process, we've learned a ton. And over the past year, we've been working on the next iteration of the BreakPack system design. And this would be the version that we will be rolling out across multiple customers in, in the future, with the first deployment that we've announced happening next year. And just to hit on a few of the highlights in the design changes, one is we as Rick mentioned, we're redesigning, a whole new mini-bot.
And that new minibot design enables higher throughput, reduced number of bots in the system by about 40%, and a lot of additional vision and AI capabilities like looking into totes to see how items are falling and distributing so we can plan how to drop the next items to maximize the tote fill rate and things like that, among other benefits. Another thing that those new minibots enable is we've redesigned the whole operator minibot workflow. And by doing this, we are doubling the number of picks per hour that an operator is able to achieve. That helps really reduce the system operating cost. And lastly, by reconfiguring the system, we've been able to pack about 50% more empty totes to use in sortation as part of that system that allows even more granular and efficient sortation of the products.
Really excited about this next version of BreakPack, and that's a big focus for the team this year.
Fantastic. Thank you. And Aftab, now that I've dragged you up on stage, thank you very much for being here. We've seen that now with the large BreakPack fleet we have, with our Symbotic fleet growing, as Rick said, with our systems getting bigger and bigger, we obviously need to be focused on how to keep our bots active. Can you talk a little bit about what your team is doing?
Sure, Bill. To put things in perspective, the system you saw today, the 600 bots there collectively travel about 20,000 mi every day. This adds up to nearly seven million miles per year for just one site. It's a lot of miles, and hence the push for higher reliability. That's where I am bringing automotive practices and rigor to robots. We are building a culture of quality by adopting Six Sigma methodology to identify and eliminate defects. We are also shifting our focus from the defects after they occur to preventing them before they even take place. We are also using Advanced Product Quality Planning methodology to systematically plan, develop, and validate products and processes, ensuring that the quality is built in the start. In summary, Bill, by coordinating, incorporating automotive methodologies and processes, we are well on our way to improve the value proposition for our customers.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Even before we get into production, we're actually using other processes to make sure we can actually bring our systems up faster. Cristian, this BreakPack system, I think I heard a dozen times, as we were walking around today. It's incredible how quickly you brought it up. Can you talk a little bit about the simulations we did to help speed that along?
Yeah. Absolutely, Bill. What we saw today is the result. What you don't see is the thousands of hours and computational cycle and iteration that we had to perform to make it successful at the beginning. We've been working very, very intensively on building a digital twin for every part of the system. We designed BreakPack with digital twin. We modeled all the carpooling interaction that Ted was talking about in simulation to see what the throughput is. We have different granularity of digital twin. The mission is twofold. One, enable faster design. We can throw a design in simulation, run it, see if it performs, see the rates. We do that at different granularity from an individual cell, an individual bot, to the entire system.
We can run our entire connected system and see what the throughput of the system is and in real time and faster than real time. And we have the goal to have a full digital twin of the entire system. 'Cause the more we have this capability, the easier it is to leverage the creativity to bring innovation on small features. And, you've seen how many deployments we will have. When we want to deploy new improvements, we need to be sure that we'll have no negative effect, that we'll have the exact KPIs that we want to obtain before we deploy to the entire fleet. And that can be very bad or can be extremely good. We want to be on the extremely good side.
Exactly.
That's why we're investing very heavily on having a full digital twin where we can do, as close as hardware, regression tests as we can to then do deployment on a pilot site and then deploy everywhere in the fleet.
Yeah. Sorry to jump in. You excited me when you said deploying new things. I wanna make sure we give the folks here at least one new thing that they haven't seen before. You can talk a little bit about mastless lift where we use the same process to bring another product to market that may not be as clear when you just walk by the systems?
Absolutely, Bill. Our system is designed in a very modular way. And we want to be able to look at every module, be able to iterate on it without affecting the rest of the system. The second most numerous items that we have in the system after the bot is the lift. Every cell has 10-20 lifts. And those in the current iteration that you see on, on the left, they are a pain point during installation. We have the mast. That's the first thing that goes. And then we build everything around it. So we challenged the team to remove that limitation, make it lighter, faster, and cheaper. And what we came out with the design was, the mastless lift that you see on the right where we leveraged the structure as the running guide. We were able to reduce the weight, about 50%.
It can deliver on the center instead of on the back, so we have less vibration, can go 20% faster, and brings huge cost saving to the supply chain.
Fantastic. Thank you very much. And so we obviously could get we could keep going down the innovation tree here, but we wanted to go we could only do it in 20 minutes, a few things. So we wanted to at least show you a little bit of this. Now I'd like to end, Ted, if you're willing. You know, we were we toured the system again today, hear folks talking about it and trying to figure out how it fits together, what how they should be thinking about it. And I think you recently were talking about it in a way that I think we should probably share with this group. So would you mind talking about that?
Sure. Absolutely. So when describing our system, we often like to use the analogy of a hard drive. And, you know, it makes a lot of sense if you think about the cases as pieces of information. Like a hard drive, we can put them away in a massive storage matrix and then on-demand retrieve any bit of information that you want. And it's pretty good, but our system differs from a hard drive in, in a couple ways. One, you know, hard drives tend to like to store related information in chunks in, in their storage medium, whereas we like to take similar cases and distribute them throughout the storage structure. Also, hard drives, you know, read and write in sort of single streams of information, whereas our system is massively parallel.
You have simultaneously many inbound streams of cases flowing in, many outbound streams flowing out, and then hundreds of robots all working in parallel at the same time, servicing those streams and moving information from one to another. And in that way, there's another biological analogy that makes a little bit more sense. And, that's a brain. And, you know, it's a little bit of a stretch, but to us, the system often seems like a living thing because with so many layers of optimization and complex algorithms, the system often surprises us in the way that it behaves and adapts to different conditions, you know, sometimes in really good ways and sometimes in less so good ways.
But, you know, as an engineer, what's really kept me engaged in all the years that I've been here is the ability to analyze and work on such an interesting and complex system that really is unlike anything else that exists in the world. And, you know, over the last few years, we've seen huge advances in the field of AI and deep neural networks. But meanwhile, we've been working on these really hard problems now for over a decade. And by studying and working on these problems for so long, we really have a deep understanding of what it is that we need to solve. Ties back into your culture of informed innovation. And so that gives us a really good head start to be able to take advantage of these advances in computational power, sensing, and AI.
While we've done so much to get the system to where it is today, we're constantly realizing how much more there is that we can do by leveraging these new technologies. That's really exciting for us.
Yeah. Well, thank you all very much. This is it this is one of the my favorite parts of the year. Thank you let me share a stage with you here. We will step away, and we'll move to our next panel and turn it back over to Jeff. Okay? Thanks.
Okay. That, that for me is very exciting. I love that stuff. Great, great discussion, gentlemen. Thank you. Next up, I wanna talk a little bit about the environment outside of Symbotic, interactions with customers, the competitive landscape to the extent it exists, and just kinda the external ecosystem we live within. If you think about it, disruptive tech companies really are about making what is considered impossible actually possible. And this is what makes for exciting investment. You know, the gentleman in the car, his grandparents rode horses, never envisioned he would be able to drive. And that gentleman in that car never envisioned the woman on the right in an autonomous vehicle. And that is obviously where we're going. So that is the vision and challenge that we have to share with our customers.
It's a difficult task, but we have a team that is certainly up to that challenge. Another exciting thing is this slide. This slide we have been presenting since our IPO. How many companies do you know that on their IPO gave a five-pronged growth strategy and over the course of two years could check four of those five boxes? We will check the fifth box, just a matter of time. This is a truly impressive track record of delivering on what we say we're going to do, and we're gonna keep doing that. With that, I'd like to just briefly talk a little bit about the next section of our panels, sharing the better supply chain, where we talk about this imperative to automate. Automation is a requirement for this industry.
The opportunity is very large and that we are increasing the number of solutions that we have to offer to the marketplace. So with that, I'd like to welcome to the stage our global sales team. Thank you, gentlemen. Starting out with Shibu Sasidharan. Shibu is responsible for developing growth strategies at Symbotic. He's recently joined us, but he has over 20 years of experience in supply chain automation. Prior to Symbotic, Shibu was Executive Vice President and Group Strategy at KION. KION is one of the largest forklift companies in the world and the owner of Dematic, where at Dematic, Shibu was Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer, where he led corporate strategy and business development. Next up, we have Jason Denmon. Jason has spent his entire career in supply chain since 2017, Jason has led Symbotic's customer relations teams. Prior to Symbotic, Jason was at Fortna.
And prior to that, he was an executive at Manhattan Associates. And finally, we're joined by Brendan Blennerhassett. Brendan is responsible for Symbotic's strategic global expansion plans. He has more than 30 years' experience growing large organizations. For example, Brendan held executive leadership roles at Comau, one of the largest automation companies in the world, well-known in the automotive and aerospace industries. And he was CEO, held CEO positions at Comau in both North America and the United Kingdom. So thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate you joining us. Brendan, we'll start with you. You know, we talk a lot about how this industry must automate. Tell us about what you're hearing from customers. What's their sense of urgency, their fear about how they're going to deliver goods to their customers over the next five, 10, 20 years?
Thank you, Jeff. What we're getting is there's probably two common pain points we're seeing, human resources being a continued problem, you know, particularly around wage inflation, retention, recruitment. That's been a major concern, the turnover. They have a lot of quality issues, a lot of downstream losses. And obviously, it's a variable they wanna control. So we're seeing that coming through from pretty much all of our customers across all the different countries we've been talking. So it seems common in that space. The second problem we're seeing is around capital and what they perceive the cost of capital they need to automate. They think they need new facilities, new infrastructure on top of the cost of the automation. And what we're trying to show them is our solution solves both of them problems. So that's now given us a great platform.
We're getting a lot of interest. We've gotta customers every day now. We're talking to all around the world. So very exciting.
Jeff, if I may add, right, today somebody asked me this question saying, "If this is so attractive, then why is that customers are not jumping for it?" Right? The way I tend to think about it is this way. You know, you talked about horses and cars. The demand for, you know, horse-drawn carriage, as you think about it, grew 40 years after Henry Ford invented the automobile, right? 40 years. And then the tipping point happened. And then it changed, and it boomed, right? I tend to think about automation to be that right now. And this is the crossing the chasm. This is the time when you really see a massive adoption coming through.
Thank you for jumping in on that, Shibu. I wanna open this up to all of you. What do you hear from customers when you describe our technology, describe the level of automation, the power of our artificial intelligence? What do they say?
Well, the understanding is still quite low and what it can actually do. I mean, our job now is informing them what the capabilities of our systems are, how we can and remember, we're not actually receiving RFQs 'cause in most cases, they don't even know that they can ask for this. So we are soliciting. We're shortlisting customers. We're taking it to them in terms of a very high-level presentation. And the response levels back is really exciting.
Yeah. I think two things. One is often in those conversations, the clients will share, "I didn't know that was possible.
Yeah.
Because the design I had and the design we'd put together did not contemplate that this was possible. And then I had several questions as we were going through the tour. And I think as we take potential clients through a tour like today, we've talked about it. We've shared videos. We've explained it. But often until they stand in front of a production system of that size and scale, they don't have the aha moment. And they need to have that aha moment to know, "No, this is truly possible.
especially the downstream benefits as well outside the DCs, as we saw in the second part of today's visit.
So nearly $23 billion in backlog. We must be doing something right. I'll start with you, Shibu. But Jason and Brendan jump in as well. You know, you guys have seen the entire spectrum of solution sets in the marketplace.
Mm-hmm.
Shibu, why don't you talk about a bit about how you look at the organization of the industry, what, you know, different strengths or weaknesses other players might have, and where Symbotic fits in?
Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Jeff. You know, I tend to think about it as sort of business models, right? And if you really think about the industry as such, I believe there is three different business models that exist within the industry today. First and foremost, primarily, what I call as point solution providers. These are bringing together, let's say, a product, a technology, a solution, might be an AMR, a crane, a software to the market. Then there is a second set of players, right, who are primarily focused on what I call delivering operational excellence. These are primarily system integrators which are bringing together existing solution sets. But they are very focused on driving cost and efficiency in that process. That's what they're focused on.
And third, our recent set of providers who are really focused on delivering a total solution, a total solution that tightly integrates hardware, software, and services. And that's the key, right? And I believe Symbotic is a total solution provider. Again, if you think about it over a period of time, pure product players will get commoditized. We have seen that in AMR recently. We have seen that with pick-and-place robots, right? And then when you think about sort of the people who are focused on operational excellence, they struggle for differentiation because they're bringing together existing pieces of technology, right? And that's where I really believe Symbotic is unique. It's because not just it's a solution, but it's also a purpose-built solution, purpose-built in a way it is actually modular and custom. Like, think about it as a Lego block, right?
Each Lego block actually unlocks a value chain or a value chain across a customer's ecosystem. So as someone responsible to drive growth and strategy, what really excites me is as you drive more and more innovation, you bring in more and more of those Lego blocks. So think about it as a hub-and-spoke model where if you really think about the current Symbotic solution as the hub, you're adding more and more spokes to it. Each spoke unlocks a completely new value chain for the customer. Thus opens up a new segment and market for us, right? And that's what is exciting. BreakPack is a clear example of that. You know, GreenBox is a clear example of that. And that's truly exciting to be able to kind of bring in all these Lego blocks and a kind of orchestrate them together.
That's why I feel it's highly differentiated.
Great. Thank you. Jason, well, Monday night, we announced our first GreenBox or our first order from GreenBox, I guess, GreenBox's customer. Tell us a little bit about how you view this new offering as another arrow in the quiver of Symbotic to serve customers' needs. And don't these markets cannibalize each other?
Yeah. I think it's a great question and one we've gotten from a number of folks. So as I think about it, it doesn't cannibalize. It creates optionality for our clients and how they want to engage with Symbotic and/or GreenBox, to have the fulfillment capabilities and the automation that we have. And so as I'm out talking with customers, many of our customers, large, well-funded, strong balance sheet, very strong credit rating. And they view the distribution and the automation as a very core competence for them. And so they want to buy that from Symbotic in a traditional transaction.
But even some of those customers in an emerging market where they don't have enough volume, with a new offering that they may have, there are going to be those segments and those intersection points where they're not ready to go build a warehouse on their own and to put the automation investment in that. And so I think even those large, strong balance sheet, customers are, are still in certain environments gonna choose to engage with us through GreenBox and to, you know, go buy available capacity on a variable basis. And then I think there's a whole sector of the market as, as we're kinda showing with this slide that is net new today. That's small and medium businesses or other organizations that are just not in a position to invest the level of capital and have their own facilities doing this.
And so I think that creates an incredibly new TAM for us of available market. But I don't see it as cannibalizing. I see it as providing options for our customers of in a given market, in a given segment, how do they wanna engage with us? And do they wanna consume that on a variable basis? Or is that something that they wanna make an investment on their own balance sheet? And for many of them, there's also just the alternative uses of capital. And I think with this first customer, that was the scenario. They have many potential strategic alternatives they're evaluating. And how do they want to apply the capital they have? And in this environment, it made sense for them to do that on a variable basis, versus doing that in an upfront capital basis.
And maybe, Jeff, if I may jump in, right? So if you think about sort of the supply chain 20 years ago, it was a linear supply chain. So you all the way went from a manufacturer to a distributor to a retailer to a store. And you and I walked into a store and got it, right? Today, if you really think about it, it's an ecosystem of an ecosystem, right? You should be able to ship from a DC. You should be able to ship from a store. You should be able to return to a store or return to a or to a DC. I mean, the customer cannot all overnight change that ecosystem, right? It has to build. So that's why they need I mean, the operator word that Jason mentioned is the functionality and the way to actually diversify their bets on it.
That's why GreenBox becomes very interesting because now they can say, "Look, for this ecosystem of ecosystems, I'm gonna own a certain piece, and I'm gonna drive it myself. There is an ecosystem that I will actually work on GreenBox and have GreenBox deliver it." So that's where it becomes very interesting.
Great. Thank you. Well, we spent the day touring the case handling system up at, in Brooksville. I thought it might just be helpful for a moment, Jason, for you to talk about how that system will be different or maybe not different in a multi-tenant environment that we might sell through GreenBox.
Yeah. So as I think about the multi-tenant warehouses that exist in the marketplace today, those are buildings that have multiple tenants in them with someone operating that building. But the only real leverage they're achieving there is by subdividing the lease. And when you think of a building that has two or three tenants in it today and you walk through that building to tour it, there's a fence in between client A and client B and client C, sometimes a wall. But they are completely separate processing areas, inventory, material handling equipment, resources, everything. And so again, when I think about the value being driven, it's really only the lease that is being shared. Versus with a Symbotic system, we have the ability to put multiple clients in that structure that you saw today.
Boxes for client A, B, and C are all on the same shelf because we have perfect inventory. When client A needs those cartons, we can provide them out in whatever format they want. So we, we see just an amazing opportunity to collapse that multi-tenant building in terms of size and to have shared investment in automation and the resources doing it as well as the lease and to just create a very different value proposition there by being able to share all of those assets, and have the fungibility of that storage to swell up for one customer at a point that another customer swell down because we haven't separated them by a fence. They're all commingled there.
Great. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. I appreciate your time and your insights.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay. Think back to that slide we looked at at the beginning or that series of slides of the dots on the map, all that opportunity we have. And by the way, I have to give our CFO, Carol Hibbard, credit for that slide sequence. That was her idea of presenting all those dots on the map. So the big question, how in the heck are we gonna scale to build that supply chain? This is probably one of the most important panels we have next where we talk about how our teams are working together to make that happen, how they will build capacity to deliver those systems, and how we're going to continue to increase our efficiency as a builder of those systems. And really what we're doing is each project is like building a skyscraper.
We have the steel structure, obviously, but there's an incredible level of automation that exists in any skyscraper. All the wiring, all the controls, the HVAC system, the building management system that operates this whole building, it's a very, very complex process. That's what each one of our systems is equivalent to. But with 38 systems now in the process of being deployed, we're not just building a skyscraper. We're building a city. And in fact, we're going to build city after city after city. And so that's the analogy to think about what has to go into the planning and the process and the innovation to make this happen. So with that, I'd like to welcome up Carol Hibbard, our CFO, and Walt Odisho, our Head of Manufacturing and Supply Chain. Thank you, two.
Yeah.
Carol has over 30 years of financial, operational, and business experience. She joined Symbotic from Boeing where she served as Senior Vice President and Corporate Controller and also served as Boeing's CFO for Defense, Space, and Security. More than a CFO, Carol is at Symbotic because she knows how to build, deploy, and manage world-class scale at a global level. Walt Odisho is our Chief of Manufacturing and Supply Chain. Walt leads the teams that are responsible for strategic outsourcing, supply chain, manufacturing, and project execution. Walt has over 30 years of experience in operations, engineering, and manufacturing. And prior to Symbotic, held roles at Boeing and Amazon. But most impressively, Walt spent over 24 years in senior manufacturing roles and operations at Toyota Motors. So with that, I'll grab a seat here. And, we have our map on the screen of all those dots you guys are gonna build.
Carol, why don't you start out by telling us a little bit about the process of deploying a system?
Okay. Thanks, Jeff. Excited to be here and part of Symbotic's future. And actually, if you could go back one chart. Not quite ready yet, since I love the dot chart. So the future here is very bright. And I think that's evidenced by several things. So as Jeff talked about, this chart is just our backlog. So as I look at that and I envision what will happen when you hear when we deploy lots of the things with the customers that the previous panel just talked about, when we go deploy all of the innovation that our tech team talked about, the future is extremely bright. The demand is there for automation and efficiency. And I think that's one of the biggest pieces that excites me about being here. So now onto the easy part, which is now we have to go deploy it and go build it.
So when we think about the life cycle of a deployment, I've done most of my career as a finance person has focused on an operational finance role where we've partnered with our business partners. And that's what Walt and I have done here. And we're establishing cross-functional teams where we're focused on the entire life cycle. So think about a build process for us includes build, installation, commissioning, and then we go live. We've talked about in the past, our early systems were about a 2.5-year process to get through this life cycle. And over the last couple of quarters, we've had several proof points where we have that down to 20 months. And our goal is to continue to find ideas to be able to reduce that. And so during this process, we wanna start right.
And so we look cross-functionally at how do we bid right? How do we develop an executable plan from a cost and a schedule perspective? And then we're deploying program management and project management tools throughout the installation phase. And then we're pulling together a closed-loop process. So for the 18 systems that we have in deployment now, we wanna take all of that data and use that to inform the beginning of the process.
Great.
Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the values that we think about that have to go into how we build, you know, build these systems and the value that we create in those systems. You wanna both take that? Yep. Carol?
Yeah. I'll start.
Yeah. Well, let me start. As you said, I started my career in Toyota. And to me, for those who drive Toyotas, quality is. It is paramount in everything that we do. So my focus has been on improving quality, eliminating the opportunity to create, to generate defects. Many companies, many firms will rely on repetitive inspection methodology to improve their quality. Our belief is that the best way to improve quality is not to create defects to begin with. So as you eliminate the opportunities and the reasons for why defects are generated, then we can clearly eliminate them at and understand the root cause and eliminate them. So the vision that I, that we have developed is achieve drive to 100% perfection. As impossible as that may sound, I think it's a noble goal.
Mm-hmm.
So we have put down 99% because we don't think 100% is within reach, but we'll always work towards that, doing everything right the first time. And by doing so, we eliminate rework, inspection. To pay someone to look for defects that are generated by someone else to me is wasteful. So by doing it right, we will also gain schedule efficiencies. In order to achieve that, we need obviously cross-functional organizational alignment, starting with absolutely great designs. And then our contracts, whether it's with our labor contract or with our outsourcing partners, brings in quality as an element of success, the criterion of success.
having platforms, tools to measure the success and improvement in quality and training of the staffing to recognize abnormality—excuse me, abnormality recognition—at its earliest stage will allow us to eliminate small problems or discomforts that could later turn into huge issues for us. And obviously, as my colleagues talked about earlier, continuous improvement, we're always thinking about, "Here's what we have at hand. Here's how it performs. How can we do it better, faster, at a lower cost, higher quality?
Great. And Carol, you and Walt have been working together with your teams and really the whole Symbotic team to really make some implement some tools and, you know, performance capability, KPIs that we're tracking. Why don't you talk about how you're looking about how we build this, process of efficiency as a team?
Yeah. So I'll start with what you saw today in the system itself was a well-choreographed functional area with all of the bots working together. And think about what Walt and I have to go manage, which is how do you choreograph that same dance across the deployment between ourselves, our supply chain, our customers? And what we're putting in place and it might sound very basic, but if you think about the fact that Symbotic has had high double-digit growth within the last 12-18 months, and as we think about the growth curve ahead of us, we need to make sure that we've got those foundational elements in the back office as well as what we're doing around all of the innovation that you saw today. So if you think about tools, we deployed our ERP in the first quarter, and we deployed it seamlessly.
So many companies struggle when they go to deploy SAP. We were able to implement it and went seamlessly through the first quarter and the second quarter. What that will provide is not just help from, you know, the finance shop and getting to close, but when you think about all of the data and the information that's going to help inform that closed-loop process from the start of a PO to the time that we get to an invoice and to the time we close out the project is all gonna help us really ramp up our functional excellence. Schedule, we talk quite a bit as schedule being one of the single greatest unlocks for us in terms of how we scale and how we reduce cost and generate higher profitability.
So we talked about 24 months dropping down to 20 months, down to our goal of 12 months. Walt's gonna share some examples here in a minute so you can picture what we're actually doing on the build process. But a couple of the other things we're putting in place as well is we've hired staff for program management and project management. So when you think about our 37 systems that we have in deployment, it is a very integrated critical path across all of that to ensure the material is arriving on time and ensure we have the commissioning resources there. And what Walt and I do is we chair a weekly cross-functional meeting that goes through critical path on those schedules. And as you're ramping and growing at the level we are, that's critical.
We're also deploying a lot of standardization both from a hardware perspective and a software perspective and evaluating the effective dates of when we can roll in new versions of something. You've heard Teddy talk about from a software perspective of how having that standardization, you can deploy things overnight from a software perspective that goes much faster. The last thing I'll talk about in terms of where we're adding value is KPIs. We have a ton of data in the system, reliability data, KPIs that were measured for how the system's working. We're also putting those in place for how we're running the business. We're looking at across our supply chain and looking at the health of our suppliers, looking at can they scale? Can they ramp? What is their quality on the product they're delivering to us? And safety.
From an innovation perspective, our innovations really are operating in our investments, we're looking at how we innovate. We're also looking at investments that help deploy the efficiency of the product for savings for our customers. You heard an example from Cristian of some of the things we're looking at that are also gonna reduce cost as we move forward. So we've got a plan in place to evaluate our ROI on all of those investment streams.
Great. Thank you. So next up, we're gonna look at some slides. I wanna give a little setup to these slides. I want you both to kinda answer these questions 'cause you two are really working on this as, as a team. We're gonna present some slides that show actual capacity improvement data and actual efficiency improvement data.
Yeah.
All the numbers have been stripped off, but everything starts on a zero axis. So it'll be a very accurate representation of the progress that we're making. And then we're gonna talk about some specific examples of how we're engineering in greater efficiency, faster deployment time. You heard about mastless lift from Cristian, something that is a significant unlock for us accelerating deployment time, but also a lot of the things that, that Walt's team and Carol's teams are building together to just make us more and more and more efficient and growing capacity. So Walt, you wanna talk a little bit about, outsourcing capacity?
Yeah. So, you know, obviously, in late 2022, early 2023, we made a decision to outsource. We are an innovation company. So, the strategy to outsource was initiated back then. So many of our suppliers are really accustomed to doing work in automotive space. And, if you're familiar with that area, automotive will come in with a single one-of-a-kind, custom-built, whether it's a fixture for paint job, weld job assembly, and so on and so forth. What we've done is that working with the same supplier, we've provided them with the product that's repeatable. So therefore, it blends itself really well to standardization.
So developing standard work at our suppliers where they become accustomed to having the technicians, the skill set that they require, applying in individual stations, and building our equipment in an assembly fashion is the most efficient way for them to, to build our equipment. What we found really interesting is that the suppliers are, are also super interested in learning that methodology because it makes them more productive. However, we are honestly super selective with the suppliers that we have. Again, it's, it's not just the quantity that's produced, but also the quality. So to that end, what we've done at manufacturing is, and I'll show examples of this later, is that it's not just building, but completing the assembly, testing the assembly, confirming the functional capability before it's ever shipped out.
So by doing that, we eliminate all that waste that I talked about earlier, and we're able to put that time that was used to inspect or repair at a much more productive way to build our equipment. So by doing that and of course, we brought in new suppliers that we're actively working with that were pre-qualified. We evaluated their background, their ability to participate in problem-solving. And so by combining their improvements, efficiency gains, as I talked about, plus additional resources, we've been able to, as you can see, really grow our capacity. The same thing applies to SymBots that you saw today. SymBot was an internally built device. Today, it's outsourced. And as such, we can not only exceed the demand that we have today, but we can look to double that volume year over year over year.
Next, I'm also responsible for deployment, which is really installation. The thinking really I think about this maybe a little bit differently. We are building a factory inside a warehouse, a factory that doesn't produce goods, but it's a factory that processes goods. The goal is to process them as accurately and as quickly, efficiently as we can to satisfy our customer. When we build these factories inside the factories, I think of it not as a construction project, but an assembly methodology, an assembly project. It's always true, if you take work away from inside the factory to outside, it is lower cost, it's more accurate, and more productive.
So what we have been working on is by removing the work from the installation to the points where we can assemble, to a much more completion level and then transfer that work just to be installed, assembled, if you will, inside the factory, we can eliminate a lot of the time that used to be spent. So by applying manufacturing lean techniques in everything that we do, just as an operator in automotive or aviation looks for a part, reaches for a part, ultimately, we want every part to be there. Standard work also applies because it's repeatable with minor differences in configuration. It applies not only to factories, but also to our installation.
Finally, by having accurate installation plans on a daily basis, understanding the number of hours that it takes to perform a task and knowing how many hours of labor you have available to you, we can clearly understand progress on a daily basis and monitor it with the tools that we have in place. Some of the work that we've done has really produced some significant gains for us. For example, over the last 13 sites, as shown here, we've been able to reduce the commissioning hours. Commissioning is power-up, really. What it does is that in the past, because there were escapes that reached the warehouses when equipment was powered up, our people found themselves troubleshooting or pursuing repairs within the warehouses, within the factory that we're building, if you will. They no longer have to do that.
Now, what I like to point out is that if you look at the trend over the last four, five sites that we've had, there's a dramatic reduction. This is where all the activity that I talked about, the improvements in the factory, went in. They went in, of course, some 12 months ago or so. But we are beginning to see the benefits, the initial benefits of what's that gonna do to our overall efficiency and, and of course, quality. So let me.
Yeah. That's great, Walt. So yeah, let's, let's make this real for people. I mean, these.
Picture.
These improvements are unbelievable. I mean, they're just incredible. So tell us a little bit about some just a couple examples of how do you do that?
Yeah. So again, upstream, completion of the work is the key. Verification of quality before it ever reaches the customer sites is critical for us. So the picture is really depicting what we did before was a skeleton mechanical build that was sent to the sites. And then our commissioning team and our electricians would have to trim, put all the trimmings, you know, wires, sensors, limit switches, so on and so forth, add to it. Whereas now, that entire assembly is completed. So really, it becomes a modular build, a plug-and-go. That's what commissioning does now. So if we find a defect, it becomes highly remarkable for us. We don't expect defects, right? So the feedback mechanism that they've developed in the event of a defect quickly addresses that issue, and it becomes a learning point also.
To wrap up, if you could just drill down a little bit for me on this concept of the construction site as an assembly line. What's the power behind that?
Yeah. Again, I'm learning, you know, in my career, I experience, I don't know how familiar you are with the concept of the kitting to, to the line. So we're applying the, the, the same concept. This seems really simple, you know, how you receive material. But when you receive thousands of boxes, right, literally millions of parts coming at you, it becomes really, really important. As simple as it sounds, it really, I mean, it's really important to, to sequence the incoming material to meet the demand at the site. How we even offload is now standardized. How we ship within a trailer, placement of, of equipment and parts is, is standardized. Color coding. And then, how we stage and while we're, we are not kitting yet, but we will start smaller kits that will go to, to our, mechanics that actually perform the work installation.
And so not only we can then evaluate progress based on installation plan that I talked about earlier, but also by the movement and consumption of the material that we're taking in.
Great. Well, thank you very much. I know that was just the tip of the iceberg from you two, but thank you so much for your hard work and.
Thank you.
Helping us figure out how to build those cities faster and faster.
All right. Thanks, Jeff.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. All right. Our next panel is frankly, it's probably the most important panel of all. It's about our people. And so I'm gonna have Bill Boyd take us through a little bit about our talent acquisition team, talent.
Hello again. One panel left. And yeah, everyone always says it, but we might have actually saved the best for last year. What we have talked about all afternoon is the things we've been able to do and the innovation we've been able to create. None of that happens, as Jeff said, without people. And it's not just having people. It's having people who work in a culture of creativity, which means, as we've talked about before, not just having ideas for the sake of ideas, but actually putting it together and helping us create innovative products and deliver them.
It means when we've got these people, you know, talent pipeline, I would use this in a slightly different way. It is having a pipeline that allows people to thrive once they're in your organization as much as it is getting them to your organization. So we invest in programs and people to actually make our experiences better and move them forward. And then lastly, you know, we're always trying to grow this innovation ecosystem. As we said before, we've got a lot of focus here because we've been able to outsource a lot of our supply chain, as you heard from Walt earlier, we're now at a point where nearly half of our 1,500 people are working in innovation-led areas or innovation-oriented areas, engineering and software that actually goes directly into our product.
Being able to attract those people, keep them, and grow them is what our incredible HR team and talent team have been doing. I'd like to bring two of our HR and talent leaders to the stage with me for a little bit more discussion. Directly to my left is Miriam Ort, our Chief Human Resources Officer. Miriam leads HR and communications organizations within Symbotic. She has more than 20 years of experience as EVP and CHRO at C&S Wholesale Grocers and Avis Budget Group. In addition, she has nearly a decade of HR leadership roles at PepsiCo, where she led HR for the global operations. And she has co-authored, you know, in her spare time, the bestselling book, One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value. Next to her is Pavi Ashok. Pavi joined us a couple years ago now, as the Head of Talent Acquisition.
She leads that organization. In that role, her team for she and her team forge partnerships with both industry professionals and academic institutions to cultivate and hire top-tier talent for Symbotic. She also has more than 18 years of experience in leading recruiting and talent acquisition teams at Wayfair and Verizon prior to joining Symbotic. With that, let's dive in. Miriam, Symbotic has obviously had a lot of growth and a lot of success recently. Can you talk to us about how the environment has changed or how what you're seeing on the horizon in HR for us?
Sure. So we're here to talk about talent. And I would say you've been involved from the beginning. So you know, Symbotic has always had great talent. Everything for those that were on the tour today, everything we saw on the tour that was years of R&D, over 400 approved patents. And a lot of the talent that worked on that is not only still with us today, but some up on this stage. But we are really seeing it accelerate. Some of that is our growth. Jeff and Carol, you know, had that backlog slide up a couple times. And when you think about the growth potential that exists there, that's really exciting for talent to come and be part of that incredible growth story.
Particularly, though, when I think about the tech talent, you know, and that is talent that is so critical to our success, the tech talent tends to care about the technology, not, not surprising. I think Symbotic is really uniquely situated, well for that. We had the tech panel up here, and they talked about some of the really exciting technologies they're working with: AI, perception, machine learning. There are other companies that are working in those spaces, but most of them are in pretty early phases. You know, they're testing. You might have, you know, a small fleet of autonomous vehicles, out sometimes in one city or one state.
But what's really different and what we talk to talent about is when they come to Symbotic, they have the chance to actually work on these technologies at scale in a way that very few other, maybe no other companies really could claim. And so the chance to come work on a technology and then know that it's gonna be pushed out and it's gonna change how we build a pallet or how we select a case that then translates into millions of cases going to a store, landing up in a customer's cart. I mean, that is really appealing to the tech talent. One related point that I would make, and Rick touched on this, is all that scale of these technologies, that creates a vast amount of data that really nobody else has. That is very compelling data to our research partners.
We have research partnerships with Georgia Tech, with MIT. We're building some others. For our employees, the chance to have that kind of collaboration with top researchers in the space, that's also just a really unique opportunity.
So it's a very powerful blend: real problems that you can see getting solved and the ability to also dive into that research. Pavi, actually, why don't you build on that a little bit more for us? Can you talk about the actual partnerships and the benefits that you're seeing as we actually look at recruiting new talent in?
Yeah. Of course. So some context over here. Just like everybody else said, talent is absolutely integral for us to be successful as a business. And, as a talent acquisition team, one of our top priorities is building partnerships with top engineering schools. Currently, almost 70% of our interns, co-ops, and new hires come from engineering schools like MIT, Georgia Tech, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, Harvard, and many more. We have this incredible talent pipeline. And for us to be able to build on these pipelines, we are committing ourselves to build research partnerships as well as improve our brand presence within these schools. One way is through the research partnership that Miriam was talking about. What we essentially do is we work with students from both MIT and Georgia Tech.
The students work with our engineering leaders to solve real-world complex problems by bringing in their theoretical knowledge as well as the practical experience that they've gained and help us further innovate. It is truly exciting. In addition to these universities, we also are forging partnerships with organizations like the Society of Women Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers, which will help us improve and diversify our talent pipeline.
Absolutely. Well, having a good pipeline, a robust pipeline, having these connections is great on one level. But then there's also the, what do you do once people get to a company? And most companies, many companies talk about having this incredible commitment to their talent and incredible drive to empower them. One of the things that I found really unique, too strong a word, but exciting about the way we do it here at Symbotic is that it actually goes all the way up to the board level with us. And Miriam, maybe you could talk a little bit about our talent advisory, tech advisory board?
Absolutely. So we established a Technology Advisory Board. And this is a board. It's an advisory board. It's made up of some of the top thinkers, researchers, industry leaders, in the robotics space. And we partner and work with that board in a number of ways. One of the ones that we've seen really have an impact is we have rolled out what we call Tech Talks . And this is the advisory board members will either come or they will bring from their network some of the top specialists in the specific areas that relate to what we're working on at Symbotic so that they can bring their thinking, their research, their case studies, and give our talent exposure to that. So that's just been something really successful. And it's not just about the talk. We tie that into continuous learning where we have follow-ups. We take ongoing questions.
We create chat forums. So it's really a dynamic process. And we don't only use the tech advisory board for these Tech Talks . The advisory board also works really closely with management to understand, you know, what are the challenges? What are those problems where maybe we're not breaking through? And then they use their network to help connect our engineers with either it might be researchers. It might be a startup, but really helping to connect our engineers beyond the Symbotic community so that we can adopt these new technologies. It's obviously a win for our employees from a development standpoint. It's also a win for Symbotic to be able to be one of the early adopters in these new technologies.
Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. And Pavi, maybe to close things out. So we, we've talked a little bit about maybe why we've been successful, how we continue to be successful. We also have the benefit, obviously, of sitting in what probably only we call Robotics Row, you know, that little area between MIT and Harvard and up to the, the New Hampshire border where there's a ton of work going on in robotics. But I guess we have to admit, that's not the end of the world. Can you talk to us more about how we're gonna continue this as we continue this incredible growth that we've talked about today?
Of course. Boston is a great area for relevant talent. There's no question about it. We've been growing in Boston. But just like our operations, our aspiration definitely doesn't stop with Boston. We wanna be more national, and we wanna be, in fact, global in scope. For example, we have a small team in Europe, and we are continuing to build over there. We also recently announced our West Coast Tech Hub, which is gonna be based at the heart of Silicon Valley. We've been opportunistically talking to talent pretty much across the country for the past couple of years. And the engineers in Silicon Valley are deeply interested in solving the problems with us and being a part of the solution, which is very exciting for us.
I think such a diverse geographic reach will help us continue to tap into the top talent pool that we have and build a world-class team.
Yep. And obviously, if we build this off of the platform of really thinking about growing our people and keeping that there, we fundamentally believe this growth is going to be additive in every way. So thank you both very much. Jeff, would you like to join us up here, and we'll move into the Q&A. We're not going anywhere, but we'll let you come on up.
Well, we've overshared, and we've gone over time. So we're going to extend a little bit longer, and we're gonna compress the Q&A. I know many of you have had a lot of great questions during the tours today, but I'm sure you also have many questions from what you've heard this afternoon. And we want our online audience to be able to listen into those questions as well. So I wanna thank everyone for the excellent job on the panels. And I wanna welcome not just the panelists. We're gonna have just the panelists, but let's have everyone that presented today come up on stage, please. So Rick, Carol, Pavi, stay with us here. And Jason, Cristian, everybody, come on up, please. All right. So we have mics roving the room. So if you have a question, raise your hand. We'll bring you a mic.
We'll begin. Why don't we start with Mark here in the back? I think, Mark, you had your hand up first right behind you. Great.
Thanks, Mark Delaney from Goldman Sachs. Appreciate you having me here. The BreakPack part of the tour was especially interesting in seeing the progress compared to the investor day you did last year. I was hoping to better understand how you think about expanding BreakPack. You spoke earlier this week about starting your second project pretty soon. But you also spoke today around an improved version of BreakPack. I think you said it will be available next year. So maybe help us think through timing of BreakPack and what the timing for more meaningful expansion of systems with BreakPack could be.
Okay. Rick, you wanna start us off there?
Well, what's the schedule, Walt, of the second BreakPack starting? And that's coming up in a year?
Yeah. Go Live is next summer.
Go Live is next summer. Okay. So that's, that's that one, where, where so that'll be a whole bunch of updated products. But I can tell you that C&S runs a very large BreakPack facility in Pennsylvania. We do one million eaches a day. It's perfect for this application. We have a couple applications on the West Coast. That's just C&S. We haven't been to CVS. We haven't been to Walgreens yet. But I think that's an application, obviously, there for those folks. The other thing we're interested in we actually had we showed it to one of our suppliers, and they were very interested in using BreakPack as a kitting operation for, for all the parts that go into a manufacturing. So Walt's taken us to we've had some talks with people like Boeing, Toyota. So I think there's I think it's gonna be a huge product.
Great. Next question. Joe?
Hey. Thanks. Two for me, and then I'm gonna sprint through the airport to catch a flight. Starting on, on BreakPack, you know, I think the unlock of being able to run e-com from the DC, as you kinda tinker with that, is really interesting. I'm just curious, like, what's the breakdown like, does it make does the geography of the sites, the DCs, that you could theoretically do that? Are they too far from the population centers where, like, last mile becomes last 50 mi, and then it doesn't make the economics work? Or do you still think that you can run, theoretically, like, e-com from the DCs there?
Yeah. So I think, I mean, the holy grail of e-com is to get the customer to pick it up. So it's that last mile transportation's very expensive. So in the application that we talked to some of our large customers about is, well, what if because of the basic system, we create so much empty space in the building that you could ship a case to a store, but you could also fulfill customer orders and deliver that tote to the store, and then the customer would come pick it up? That's really the holy grail of e-commerce. Having Amazon trucks or Walmart deliveries delivering to your house is very expensive.
So if the customer can be incentivized, come pick up your order and get a couple gallons, either a free charge or a free electric charge, gas, anything less than $10, which is what the delivery cost is, a real win for the store. If the customer's gonna come and pick up milk, which is not probably gonna be delivered all that frequently, or eggs on e-commerce, that's a real win. So, and the magic is that if you look at a supercenter, which over the course of the year carries 300,000 items, that's about 90% of what's sold in e-commerce. Now, the other 10%, which is what makes e-commerce magical, is the other 15 million items that you know you can go on an Amazon site and find anything you want. So, those slower movers could be centralized.
But the faster movers, which are the most expensive to deliver, could actually be in DCs.
And then last this question, kind of a weird one. But when, when you think about the vision that you're putting on this, the SymBots, and, clearly, that unlocks a lot of things. And when I think about the mini-bots in the BreakPack, you know, that, that is almost like it just looked like a much more streamlined operation without bots kind of going across each other and things. Can those bots almost be, like, dumber? Can they be, like, AGV almost because you don't need to you don't need to avoid each other as much? And, like, does that do anything for you if they it seems like you don't need as much capability there?
Will Ted grab it?
Yeah. That's a great question.
I'm gonna pick that one.
You calling Ted dumb, I think. So I'll let Ted answer that.
So we had the same exact thought when we first started working on BreakPack. And we said, "Somebody out there must make a robot that we can just buy, and it's gonna be really cheap, and it's just gonna go around in circles." And as we got more into the problem, we learned more about what it takes to deliver the throughput levels that we need, the more we realized that we did actually need a fair amount of technology in that. And in the direction that we moved is trying to make the mini-bots as efficient as possible so you have as few of them. And that's how we really drive efficiencies in the system. So we had that we had the same initial intuition. And, you know, we learned that it does need some advanced technology in there.
But you could make a mini-bot, to Ted's point you could make, and it's your point. You could make a mini-bot that probably costs half as much, but it probably has about 97% accuracy in the tote. So what we're finding with all this technology is that that is to get to Six or Seven Sigma is very expensive. But once you develop it, then you can slice and dice and reduce the cost. So we're maybe a little bit obsessed on the technology itself. Though we're certainly not a technology company for technology's sake. But having the ability and then, as we introduce this to customers, them saying, "Oh, could you do this? Could you do this?" and not having to spend two years to reinvent something is what I'm focused on.
Thank you.
Great. Andrew?
Hey, guys. Andy Kaplowitz from Citigroup. I mean, clearly, you've always been focused on quality and safety and what have you. But it does seem like today, you're talking about sort of a real focus on Six Sigma, you know, and really improving the system. And I think, Carol, you talked about, you're getting through some low-margin projects on the earnings call. And you did that big restructuring, Rick. So does that mean a pretty big jump in gross margins as you look forward? I, I know you're, you know, not gonna give guidance, all that kinda stuff. But, like, at the same time, I, I do sense, like, a increased focus. And maybe you clear out stuff with that restructuring. And sort of you move forward into next year, you know, on a higher playing field. Is that the right perception of what's going on here?
I'd say yes. I'll start. Then I know you talked quite a bit about quality, as did Aftab. And it's a huge focus, not just for cost, though. It's a focus for scale. So you can't possibly scale if you have poor quality coming from your supply chain, or we, in fact, aren't coming down the learning curve in terms of how we're commissioning. So it's both. There is a big focus on doing that. But I think the start of that focus was on how do you continue to scale and grow? 'Cause with the backlog that we have, we have to deliver that backlog flawlessly so that we can continue to make room to improve and grow the rest of it. I don't know, Walt, if you had.
Yeah. I think I do agree. Yeah. It's all about scaling and, and spending energy where we need to in order to achieve, the volume that we need.
And then maybe just one other quick one, maybe for Rick or the sales team. Like, all of these innovations, you know, you talked, I think, in the beginning about, you know, one of the Brooksville systems costing, like, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, if I quoted you. So when you think about payback period, like, how has the pitch changed now versus maybe a couple years ago? Like, is it can you pitch a much faster payback period now? I assume you can. But how has it evolved, even just over the last couple years?
Jason, you wanna take that?
I'll take that. So I, I think we have more experience. We knew two years ago and three years ago the big buckets of efficiency, around labor efficiency, transportation efficiency, savings in the store. I, I think going back to the to the store visit, this afternoon, they talked about the real advantages of things like not having damages and not having mispicks. Three years ago, those were very small line items on the on the business case and discussion. I, I think now, we have those proof points and those demonstrable areas with the existing clients to make those a real conversation about what does that really mean in terms of sales lift, how do you really, with industrial engineering-level studies, prove the savings in the store?
So I think there's just a lot of refinement on where those value lines are and also proof points and just a lot more depth to what those line items really look like.
Yeah. So if you may add, right, like, previously, there was only one S that was driving the automation saving, which is scale. Today, there is three S's of driving automation, which is really what I call space, speed, and scale. So if you really looked at the Symbotic systems today, you can really then walk back and say, "How much savings are you providing for scale," which is labor. Then you're talking about speed. And you kind of talked about the, the GM in the store talked about the speed, right, in which he's able to get it to the, the consumer faster. Then you're really talking about space, the density, and how much space savings we are able to get. So it's not just about scale. We are also able to now talk about value proposition around speed.
We are able to talk about space savings as well.
Well, unfortunately, we have time for just one more question. So, gentlemen in the back?
Danny Eggerichs, Craig-Hallum, just kinda referencing that initial adoption initial dot plot, where you kinda see how the deployments are progressing. And especially when you layer in GreenBox, the opportunity there, especially internationally. Assuming that kind of rolls out and starts its ramp in the U.S., what does it take? What are some primary focus areas to make that international jump with GreenBox?
I think the biggest opportunity for GreenBox is the ports. If you think of what happens with the ports so you have a container ship come in with, I don't know, 5,000 containers. And there's a book called The Box that talks about the containers. But what that did is it took the shipping costs of product from around the world and reduced the shipping cost. Handling costs went up. You have to hand load those containers, and you have to hand unload the containers. The shipping costs were more was the thing that they attacked first. So if you see and you think of a container. It's got 5,000 containers. Could be 500. Could be 1,000 different suppliers have stuff on those containers. And then they all go their different way.
If we could consolidate if we could unload those containers and automate that process and consolidate all those suppliers in a building where they felt safe and secure, cybersecurity, and we have perfect inventory and perfect selection, that-that's a way bigger business than even Walmart. That-that's the biggest business in the world. 40% of everything coming into the U.S. is imported. So, so that's where we're taking our time. We're working. SoftBank is very well connected with a lot of the, people that run ports around the world. And that's one of the reasons why they wanted to partner with us on GreenBox. So we're just getting started with GreenBox. And, I think it's gonna be the other book I like is I was thinking about that today is the it's called The Slow Pace of Fast Change.
It goes slow, slow, slow, then fast, fast, fast, which is what happened with transistors. And as Shibu said, it's not like people are gonna stop selling other types of automation. But at some point, they will, the other types of automation will really diminish and will become the supplier. But consolidating, so if you think about what we're doing, which is what's very cool at Walmart, is we build these pallets. But actually, what we do is there's 100,000 different items in that warehouse that we can get any box in that warehouse within four minutes from inside the system to outside the system. If you could do that on the ports, you'd build very, very, very large warehouses with lots and lots of product in them. And that would be the consolidation point in Houston, Long Beach, Savannah, Norwich. The ports are identified.
Different ports ship different things. Some ship more cars and chemicals than consumer goods. But those big ports is just a huge opportunity to consolidate. And nothing's happened on those ports for 30 years. All that's happened is they have bigger cranes to move the containers. But they have no way of unloading those containers efficiently. And so I think that's a big opportunity for GreenBox.
All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for your time today. Thank you, audience, for your participation and your great questions. Thank you to our online audience. I, my congratulations to you. Thank you. Thank you. Have a nice day.