With a dreaded pandemic sweeping across the world and changing the dynamics of economy and consumer behaviour, logistics industry has undergone a sea-change in terms of its goals and operation. The age can veritably be called an epoch of booming e-commerce, where buyers have strongly leaned towards buying items online. It has resulted in an unprecedented increase in the traffic of supply chain and concurrently the need of streamlining it to stop the gigantic amount of energy from going haywire has become the need of the hour. Hence, along with all other practices that have been instated and reinstated, the importance of warehouse automation has also come to the fore.
As the eponymous term goes, warehouse automation refers to the inclusion of machine, software, AI and all other ancillary technology in the corpus of the warehouse to reduce human involvement and errors and amp up efficiency and productivity. Having said that this particular process is extremely efficacious, let us not delude ourselves by thinking that it is a very seamless procedure and would invoke raining money on the warehouses from the very word go. It is indeed an expensive enterprise, with money worth millions getting pumped in. Sometimes, with a lack of proper vision and without a prior fixed goal in the form of KPIs, the money invested may get drained down in huge losses. Thus it is of utmost significance that companies chalk out an even-handed plan as to what degree they wish their warehouses to get automated and should have a very clear objective and step-by-step plan to go about achieving their target.
The embryonic form of warehouse automation lies in an effective WMS which can give a clear definition to the warehouse and directs the workers in picking, receiving, putaway in a well-orchestrated way. It can also help in the backend jobs by replacing simple spreadsheets in the tasks of monitoring and documenting. With the help of AIDC technology such as barcoding, SKU, RFID and other types of sensors warehouses can securely label locations, pallets and even individual items which can greatly reduce operational mistakes, cut down on hollow time and curtail risks and render help to inventory control. WMS can also help in clubbing the data of the orders together so that the items are picked at one go, so that workers need not go back and forth doing the same thing. These sophisticated software solutions are highly configurable as they can get easily integrated with the legacy system of the warehouses with the help of API or EDI.
However, the physical aspect of the warehouse automation is the incorporation of robotics, machine learning, internet of things and artificial intelligence. While this facet of automation is revolutionary in itself and bears testimony to the magnitude of scientific progression, it incurs high-end cost in planning and implementation requires regular maintenance and may end up becoming burdensome. While the cobotics model of automation uses robots and other ultra-modern machines to aid human beings, there are some companies that have gone forth with advanced automation techniques where human intervention is greatly reduced and drones, carousels, conveyers, automatic guided vehicles, autonomous mobile robots, forklifts loaded with sensors, vertical lift systems, mini loaders, tote shuttles and other forms of automated storage and retrieval systems are fully deployed in all the stages of a consignment’s life-time in a warehouse. It ranges from locating times to receiving; from picking to packing, from putaway to shipping. Such automation system can also provide aid in sorting the consignment and thus saves the time and resources that would have otherwise gone wasted in running pillar to post in procuring items and thus is hugely beneficial in just-in-time and FIFO deliveries. While many would argue that such a system is directly detrimental to labour-intensive jobs and would thus majorly affect employability of skilled workers, it is also true that it requires a good amount of labour force to configure, install and maintain these machines. Thus the apprehension of lay-off is partially wrong. Moreover, if we go by the current trends, we would see that the manufacturing sector that produces these modern gizmos is flourishing and they also require a good deal of skilled workers. Thus the problem of employability is finely balanced.
Since automation can burn a hole in the company’s pocket and the fear of the company’s running into loss may not entirely be ruled out, there must be a prolonged and careful planning that should precede the process. Before the plans are laid out, an experts’ committee has to be formed who would review the company’s needs of automation and the degree of it. They must communicate with the peers from the other companies that have taken the plunge into automation to know the pros and cons, judiciously go through the market trends and then zero in on the vendors according to the need and financial stability of the business. They must request the vendors for detailed demonstration, warranty policies so that there is no hidden clause that may end up being bone of contention. Clear KPIs must be set so that there is a yardstick to measure the success of the enterprise. And once everything has been fixed, the big data regarding the company that is there is the ERP or the WMS needs to be collected so that an easeful integration can be formulated.
Assessment of risk and being abreast with the market trends is the key to reap fruit in an overhaul that is unquestionably costly. However, in order to stop repetitive task, to increase customer satisfaction through order fulfilment accuracy, to utilise resources in a sensible way, enhance data accuracy and security, analyse the collected data in a more efficient way, reduce stockout, tackle shortage of trained employees and manage inventory and warehouse space in a better way, automation is a good investment that can promise handsome ROI, provided one channelises and handles this overwhelming phenomenon with a lot of ownership and pragmatic wisdom.