FEATURE
Automated warehousing
Scaling up for viable warehouse automation
Taken as a whole, automation across multiple channels can bring big rewards. Dan Migliozzi, Head of Sales at independent systems integrator, Invar Group, explains
F
or many manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, the multiple channels or routes to market continues to be a conundrum. On the one hand, businesses need to ship many small orders – to private residences, pick-up lockers and small companies, on the other to physical stores, wholesalers and larger business customers, most likely by the palletloads. Hybrid models such as click’n’collect may also be included, and the balance between all these channels is dynamic.
Although this is nothing new, there is still very little consensus on how to best serve these channels – from a single location and common inventory or separate stocks and even locations. This is a task for warehouse automation. In most cases, businesses will need a
presence across all channels, for customer convenience as well as business sense.
Going multi-channel Apart from savings on facilities – rents, rates, utilities, labour and more – a common inventory maximises availability of goods across all channels. It requires less stock and demand forecasting is simpler. the increasingly expensive problem of reintroducing returns to the available inventory. Inter-channel ratios vary enormously, but we commonly see businesses with a roughly 70:30 split between e-commerce was moving through its own dedicated facility, it might well be uneconomic and the site considered for closure, but any size trade. A single operation that is able to address all these channels will help warehouse automation helps.
40 September 2024 | Automation
Flexible automation including higher throughputs, reduction in errors, damage and wastage, and lower labour requirements. By also adding the appropriate IT, there’s greater visibility and more accurate and timely management, all achieved in a single integrated system rather than a number of separate – possibly incompatible – systems.
Analysing the operations
The mechanics of automated pallet-
required for picking and packing individual small items. There are many technologies that can help, including AGVs, AMRs, shuttles, sortation systems, smart racking, cobots and automated aids to manual processes. And automation is agnostic to the channel, since it cares about weights, sizes and throughputs, not for the size of the order or its the intelligence. Intelligent warehouse systems orchestrate all the varied types and capabilities of automation, ensuring that goods and orders are routed as to dispatch, and returns, if required. The problems.
Some of this intelligence is quite
straightforward – simple PLC codes to identify destinations and direct orders. In other areas, warehouse software can study Big Data, also adding to the intelligence areas where demand forecasting is really fast movers, demand peaks, slack and busy periods and shifts between channels, taking a forward view of stock reorders, carrier requirements and more, making Despite what some vendors may infer, this sort of intelligent warehouse software isn’t AI, at least not yet, it’s mostly very clever algorithms. But, if intelligent software, along with sensors, edge devices and the cloud, is properly integrated, the data-driven insights can deliver great quality checks, and a lot more.
automationmagazine.co.uk
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