Active Ants: optimal distribution thanks to innovation, automation, robots, smart software and Dell Technologies
As an e-fulfillment company, Active Ants takes care of the entire logistics process. In this process, Dell PowerEdge servers form the brain that calculates the entire routing for the 80-plus robots driving around.
Active Ants was founded in 2010 to make e-fulfillment more accurate and efficient through innovation, automation, robots and smart software. Active Ants is one of the larger e-fulfillment players in the Netherlands with more than 250 customers. In 2022, the company processed nearly 5 million orders. Active Ants has two warehouses in the Netherlands and one in Belgium, Germany and the UK. From there, it sends orders around the world - as such, it also has an Australian webshop in its customer base. In the Netherlands, Active Ants employs around 400 people, of which around 80 work in the office and the rest in the warehouses. As an e-fulfillment company, Active Ants handles the entire logistics process for its customers, generally web shops; from receiving and storing web shop products in its warehouses, to packing and shipping the orders. Active Ants aims to be the best e-fulfilment party for SMEs and build e-fulfillment centers in all major countries in Europe to serve its customers even better.
Roeland Lengers, IT director at Active Ants, says: "The heart of our automated system is the so-called Autostore, which runs on Dell PowerEdge servers. Here, products are stacked in bins in a grid. Robots drive on that grid and take out these bins to process an order. If products don't fit in those bins - like bicycles, for example - we can't automate the process and manual labour is involved. Moreover, those products take up space in the warehouse, are prone to theft and get dusty - disadvantages that the Autostore does not have. That is why we focus on customers with a minimum of 95% of the assortment fitting into our Autostore."
Trends: internationalisation, customer experience and security
Trade, especially in the consumer market, is becoming increasingly international. Roeland Lengers: "Until two years ago, the majority of orders went to addresses in the Netherlands and a small part to Belgium and Germany. Since two years, more than 50% have been going to more distant countries." Another trend, according to Lengers, is that people have become used to buying products online. Providing a good customer experience is important, companies need to be more customer-centric and give them what they expect, or even more. " Furthermore, customers expect more and more convenience and insight, which in turn interacts with the amount of data we have to process," Lengers says. "In addition, security has been, is and will continue to be a concern. Especially with the latest boom in ransomware attacks on logistics companies. Not only security of the data in our database, but also of the servers all running on Microsoft Azure, is important. For example, to comply with AVG legislation, we are anonymising the data."
Dell Technologies laptops and servers
Two years ago, Active Ants switched from desktops to laptops so that employees could work anywhere. Wanting to standardise, the company switched from a local laptop supplier to Dell Technologies. Lengers says: "Dell Technologies operates globally and given our expansion plans, it makes sense to choose a partner that can deliver quickly in multiple countries."
In addition to laptops and docking stations, Active Ants also chose PowerEdge servers from Dell Technologies. Lengers explains: "The company from India that supplies the robots for our warehouses demanded specific hardware that controls their robots, the Dell Technologies PowerEdge R640. It is very easy to meet our supplier's requirements because this specification is the same all over the world."
Dell Technologies supplies the servers, thinks along, provides advice and uses Live Optics to analyse the IT infrastructure and workloads. This gives Active Ants a complete overview of its IT environment and reveals performance bottlenecks. The servers run software and AI from Active Ants. Berend de Boer, Data Center Inside Sales Engineer at Dell Technologies: "Active Ants chose Dell because of the direct personal contact and because Dell delivers worldwide. If they set up a site in another country, we can provide the products and support there. We can operate internationally and locally, which is very important and convenient for Active Ants."
Personal contact, next-day support and good account management
Active Ants' system administrators were already familiar and satisfied with Dell Technologies' solutions. When they started standardising, several parties were compared, but Dell Technologies was already the preferred choice. Imme van der Brug, ICT system administrator at Active Ants: "The personal contact and the fact that we have a single point of contact - also for non-Dutch sites - is great. Dell provides good account management, offers next-day support and is reliable, which is important for both servers and clients if you have to deliver remotely."
On working with Dell, Piet van Wier, senior system and network engineer at Active Ants, says: "We have Dell's technical support, the ordering process is simple and insightful and the lines of communication are short which makes for a pleasant collaboration." According to his colleague Van der Brug, on-site support is the biggest advantage. As a result, it doesn't take months to recover a laptop in need of repair, for example. In addition, it was a requirement of Active Ants to be able to manage everything remotely. Thanks to Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), every Dell PowerEdge server includes a powerful processor for remote server management. Designed for secure local and remote server management, it helps IT staff deploy, update and monitor Dell PowerEdge servers anywhere, anytime. Van der Brug says: "iDRAC access to PowerEdge servers is very important. Resolving something remotely in a short time is preferable to driving somewhere for two hours to solve it. How well iDRAC works is a Dell differentiator." The PowerEdge R640 also ensures stable processing. This is crucial as there should be no disruptions on the grid.
The PowerEdge servers fit Active Ants' needs well: they offer ample computing power, are user-friendly and management is simpler. De Boer: "With many other suppliers, if you have one server, you can simply log in. But if you have five then it's a different story. With the R640 servers, you can easily expand and turn them into a cluster. Should Active Ants build another cluster, they can copy it one-to-one, making all the settings the same. This saves a huge amount of work." Active Ants wants to grow across Europe and Dell Technologies is happy to enter into this strategy with them.
