Mike Futch of Tompkins Robotics discusses how COVID-19 has affected warehouse automation and microfulfillment for good– and perhaps even for the better! Danny: Well hello and welcome to today's Executive Series. Today I have Mr. Mike Futch, who is the president of Tompkins Robotics. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage Executive Series. Mike: Thank you so much for having me, I'm glad to be here. Danny: I'm excited to hear your story. We were having some great chatter before we were recording here, so I'm excited to kind of jump into all of that good stuff. But before we dive into the story a little bit, just for those who are not familiar with Tompkins Robotics, just give me a quick little high-level: what you guys do. Mike: So we're a company that makes AMRs that do sortation and so we use these small robotic vehicles, and we sort items, such as a calculator here or a pair of reading glasses, a pair of shoes, and we sort the items for an order to replenish store shelves, fill your ecommerce order coming to your home, the grocery items at the grocery store that you would pick up on your way home from the office. We use them to sort all these different types of items to include outbound shipping, returns, and other channels as well. And so we've come up with a way to use these small autonomous robots, and use a fleet of them to do what big, heavy, long lead time, more expensive, less flexible types of sortation systems of the past did. And it is a very unique take. As a matter of fact, we have some really interesting ways that we can use our system. Everything in our system is on wheels, including the surfaces the robots run on, the charge stations, everything is portable and modular and configurable. And it's an entirely different take on how to do those processes that are required to be done up and down the supply chain, in every tier of the supply chain. Danny: Awesome, well, I'm excited to kind of get into that a little bit more. I'm sure there's going to be some great topics that we're going to uncover as we have a conversation around that but before we jump on I want to get to know Mike. I want to get to know you a little bit more. So tell me, how did you get into... Well take me before Tompkins, take me before... how did you get into this crazy business? Mike: For a poor kid that grew up in North Carolina out in the country and worked on farms from the time that he was 11 years old, this is a far cry from what I was doing when I was growing up. I went to college, I was in the Air Force, I got out. A guy by the name of Jim Tompkins, same guy whose name is Tompkins in Tompkins Robotics, gave me a shot and I was a consultant for decades. I worked at Tompkins, I worked at Guard Consulting back in the day, Deloitte Consulting, I came back to Tompkins eventually. And then in 2017, I was sitting around and I was looking at these whole AMRs, autonomous mobile robots doing things like moving a trade across the floor of a warehouse. And it dawned on I and the two guys I was talking with that wow, if we could make that robot run a little faster, and we could put a little tilt tray on top of it, we could put individual items on it, go to a destination and tilt it into a container or receptacle. And as soon as we thought about sorting items for an Amazon order, and then we've realized we could use it for returns, and we could use it for store replenishment, we could use it for outbound shipping of small packages, that type of stuff is sent to your mailbox every day. It was almost like our heads exploded like a jet.com commercial and I was hooked. And so we went immediately and started working on this as hard as we could. And we've had some success. We've got over 10,