FEATURE Materials Handling
Best use of technology
in the scaling up warehouse automation systems
By Oli Qirko, Senior Vice President – US Industrial, Consumer and Energy Division, Cambridge Consultants T
ough challenges await both the big industry players and the new wave of start-ups with ambitions in warehouse automation. Right
now, the big picture is clearly dominated by the business eff ects of the pandemic. The signifi cant acceleration of e-commerce and resulting demands from consumers for rapid service has put huge pressure on the delivery side. This weight of expectation on logistics has been heightened by the severe labour shortage.
The traditional material-handling systems
are not built to address the current and future operations and logistics needs. And, on the other side of the coin, the innovators and start-ups have their own problems when it comes to rising to the rapidly-changing market needs. They might have a solution that works in the lab, but has not yet reached maturity to be market-ready and used by large companies like Walmart, FedEx and others. It may not operate as seamlessly with other technologies in the warehouse, and may not be as safe, robust and reliable for large- scale applications.
The situation can be boiled down to three essential tasks, the fi rst being to continue the experimentation cycle to advance a capability. The second is scaleability, which means elevating their strategy to a system
38 February 2022 | Automation
thinking approach with the necessary product development processes. The fi nal one is convergence and interoperability – new solutions must work with existing systems and each other, as one single solution will not necessarily meet all end-user needs. Developing an autonomous system that can reliably operate, i.e., navigate and articulate actions, under various operating environments is hard to build with only limited real-world data. Moreover, it can take decades of usage in diff erent environments to prove reliability and/or functional safety based on real-world data. We need to augment fi nite real-world data with synthetic data and simulation capabilities to be able to build a reliable system that performs under various workloads and navigation needs, and establish a safe working environment in warehouses. An automation system can be safely built in simulation mode to meet diverse operational, reliability and functional safety needs.
When it comes to the merits of future-
proofi ng, there are various schools of thought, one being that rapid technology development makes future-proofi ng almost impossible – and that end users may need to adopt an iPhone/PC user model for warehouse technology, with new features and new capabilities coming on stream year
after year. But there’s a counter argument that this is capital equipment and a signifi cant undertaking, so some future-proofi ng in terms of anticipating future demand is absolutely necessary.
Companies spend millions of dollars on
warehouse automation projects that can take a decade to return profi t. They also invest time and resources in verifying, validating, launching and deploying – and even the most benign changes need a full circle in that process. So, latest tech on the hands of users is all well and good, but this is mission- critical capital equipment and its updates bear signifi cant costs.
At Cambridge Consultants we spend a lot of time helping clients with the issues of scale up, fl exibility and reliability. We urge them to not focus only on technology, but rather deliberate on how to select and deploy technology at scale within their operations. We utilise simulation end-to-end, allowing for operational needs and business KPI to drive system requirements in terms of functionality and performance rather than the other way around.
CONTACT:
Cambridge Consultants
www.cambridgeconsultants.com
automationmagazine.co.uk
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