Kenco Triples Warehouse Automation Lab in Chattanooga

A 30,000-square-foot test floor in Chattanooga is giving warehouse automation vendors something many product demonstrations cannot: room to fail before a customer’s operation does.

Kenco opened its expanded Innovation Lab on September 10, tripling the footprint of the 10,000-square-foot facility it launched in 2015. The third-party logistics provider says the larger site can accommodate bigger systems, more equipment running simultaneously and warehouse conditions that better resemble a live distribution center.

That distinction matters as automation shifts from isolated machines to connected workflows. Kenco plans to evaluate at least 30 robot types across more than a dozen technologies, including processes that move goods from a trailer dock through transport and depalletizing. Earlier details from FreightWaves described a demonstration involving GreyOrange platforms, AutoStore equipment and GreyMatter orchestration software.

The lab’s role is not to serve as a showroom for one preferred supplier. Kenco says it is vendor-neutral, allowing original equipment manufacturers to test systems in a working-style environment while customers assess performance without signing a purchase order. That creates a useful buffer between a polished sales demo and the messy constraints of a warehouse, where floor space, sequencing, labor patterns and software interoperability determine whether a project pays off.

One target is random mixed-SKU pallet building. Many robotic palletizing systems depend on products arriving in a precise sequence, a limitation that narrows their usefulness for 3PL operations handling varied customer inventories. Solving that problem would make automation more practical in large facilities where cases do not arrive in a robot-friendly order.

Kenco also expects the additional height and floor area to support vertical systems such as cycle-counting towers, reflecting a broader push to extract more throughput from expensive warehouse footprints.

The company operates about 140 locations across North America and employs more than 7,500 people, according to FreightWaves. For Kenco, the lab is therefore both a technology proving ground and an operating safeguard. A failed experiment is cheap. A failed rollout across a customer network is not.