Lotte joins fast-delivery race with AI, big data technologies

Lotte Global Logistics hub terminal in Jincheon [Source : Lotte]

Lotte, which was once South Korea’s biggest name in offline retail business but now lags behind its rivals in e-commerce and logistics, is accelerating its effort to enhance its logistics infrastructure with cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and big data.

Lotte Global Logistics, a logistics arm of Lotte Group, has added a slew of new hi-tech logistics facilities across the country this year, and of them, its hub terminal in Jincheon that was opened early this year has successfully made Lotte’s logistics system more efficient, accurate and faster, according to the country’s logistics industry on Tuesday.

Its hub terminal in Jincheon, a three-story building with a size of 23 soccer stadiums, is equipped with AI-powered facilities. Its automated three-way sorting system categorizes parcels based on their sizes with 99.8 percent accuracy thanks to machine learning technology. With improved efficiency, the Jincheon terminal handles 1.8 million parcels daily, around 10 percent of the country’s entire daily parcel volume.

The terminal also stores parcels for non-Lotte e-commerce firms for their on-the-day delivery for customers in provinces.

Lotte Global Logistics opened a smart fulfillment center in Yangsan in May. It is expected to contribute largely to easing logistics bottlenecks in the country’s southeastern region. The fulfillment center is equipped with high-tech logistics solutions such as AI robots.

Its latest smart fulfillment center in Icheon, opened in July, is responsible for third-party logistics. It is powered by automated logistics systems including robotic machines called depalletizers that unload packages or products from the pallet, robotic sorters for sorting parcels, and autonomous mobile robots (AMR).

With its advanced logistics infrastructure, Lotte Global Logistics has significantly reduced product damage and misplaced order cases across the nation. It has also shortened delivery time notably.

The firm applied its self-developed automated parcel sorting solution and two other logistics technologies for patent registration.