Your pick face is full. Your racks aren't.
The fastest SKUs in your building are fighting for waist-to-shoulder frontage while the levels above them hold reserve stock. Torix robots turn upper rack levels into live pick faces, expanding face-pick area on the racking you already own. Start with a single aisle and grow as it proves out. No mezzanine. No new storage system. No relocation.
Typical rack height. Picking stops at 8. The rest of the building holds reserve.
Face-pick frontage, from the 2–4 reserve levels above every ground-level face. Your rack profile sets your number.
Construction, permits, new racking or inventory migration. Start with one aisle.
Based on typical rack profiles and industry ranges, not customer results. We simulate your number in a week.
More fast movers than room to pick them
Every operation eventually runs out of golden-zone frontage. Today's answers are construction projects, slow machines, or a bigger building.
The golden zone is finite
Slotting is free and always first, and it hits a hard ceiling. When your top movers overflow waist-to-shoulder height, faces shrink, stockouts multiply, and 5–15% of pick productivity goes with them. The only direction left is up.
The fixes are construction projects
Pick towers and mezzanines multiply frontage, but at $500k–$5M+, with permits, fire codes and months of disruption. Goods-to-person means migrating inventory into someone else’s storage system. Both are bets you can’t undo.
Floor robots stop at shoulder height
AMR fleets speed up walking, not frontage. Multi-level pick modules sub-optimize them because the robots cannot go up. Man-up trucks can, but slowly, one aisle at a time, with a person in the air.
A complete pick workflow, from floor to top shelf
Not a robot purchase. Torix lands and runs the whole workflow: which SKUs go up, robots that pick them, and the software that keeps it all on SLA.
Robots that pick where people can't
Mobile manipulators reach upper rack levels on your existing racking and pick cases and totes directly from reserve heights, while autonomous forklifts keep pallets and floor-level stock moving. Multi-vendor by design: the best body for your racks, aisles and loads, orchestrated by one AI-native brain.
Intelligence above the robots
Torix decides which SKUs earn an upper-level pick face, sequences picks and replenishment, and routes around congestion, decisions today's WMS can't make. Integrates with the WMS you run today; nothing is ripped out.
Start with one aisle
Pilot the workflow on a single aisle, proven in a digital twin of your site before go-live. When the numbers land, extend aisle by aisle. The footprint grows with the results, not ahead of them.
Every other way to buy frontage is a buildout
Four ways operations expand pick face today, and what each one costs you beyond the check.
| Capital | Timeline | Your racking? | The catch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pick tower / mezzanine | $500k–$5M+ | Months + permits | Replaced | Fixed layout; a sustained-volume bet you can't undo |
| Man-up trucks | $35k–$70k / truck | Weeks | Kept | Slow picks; one truck per aisle; people working at height |
| Goods-to-person | $1M–$20M+ | Months–years | Replaced | Inventory migrates into the vendor's system; lock-in |
| AMR-assisted picking | RaaS | Weeks | Kept | Zero added frontage. Walking gets faster; racks stay reserve |
| Torix upper-rack picking | RaaS | Weeks | Kept | Upper levels become pick faces. Start with one aisle; scale as needed |
Cost figures - order-of-magnitude industry ranges, for comparison only
From reserve racks to pick faces in weeks
One data drop, one simulation, one aisle to start, on the building you already run.
Simulate your site
Share WMS extracts and rack layouts. We build the digital twin, run the slotting plan, and show the frontage and throughput gain. Verdict in a week.
Pilot one aisle
Robots arrive tuned to your aisles, loads and levels, and start on a single aisle. No construction, no permits, no inventory migration, and the rest of the floor runs untouched.
Grow on results
Torix runs the workflow to SLA, monitoring pick success, throughput and exceptions, with support that answers. When the pilot numbers land, extend aisle by aisle.
See how much pick face your racks are hiding
A typical 500k sq ft fulfillment center runs 20–60 people moving stock between reserve and pick faces, $1.5–5M a year in labor. Tell us about your site and we'll simulate your upper-rack capacity, before you price a single mezzanine quote.
Simulate my siteor write to contact@torixsystems.com