FEATURE Automated Warehousing
Keith Fisher, president of Honeywell Intelligrated, explores the key emerging trends that will shape warehouse automation over the next year. They reflect a core theme for the industry: that automation adoption is on the rise, bringing enhanced safety, productivity and workforce retention
W
arehouse and distribution centres (DCs) are grappling with a signifi cant and ongoing
labour shortage, and neither increased wages nor added benefi ts have reversed this. Rapidly-growing demand for faster delivery and the ongoing supply chain disruptions add to the challenge. Warehouse safety issues also remain a problem for recruitment and retention of workers.
Amidst this perfect-storm-type
environment, warehouse and DC operators are actively seeking ways to digitise operations, add automation technology and integrate these technologies with software systems, in their aim to increase effi ciency, reduce the human labour requirements and create safer, more productive workplaces.
Six key trends Specifi cally, Honeywell sees six main trends emerging in the warehouse and DC industries:
1. Rapidly increasing adoption of proven automation technologies We are already seeing heightened interest in long-proven warehouse automation systems that pick, pack, sort and carry packages throughout the facility. There is also investigation into how to integrate this automation into warehouse software systems, such as warehouse management and warehouse control systems (WCS), to extract more value from automation. Regardless of the labour shortage or the degree of automation companies have already adopted, SKU proliferation, widely-varying order profi les and seasonal demands are making automation a necessity. For many operations, order picking or packing are the entry point to digitalisation and automation. For those further down the path, integrating these technologies into operations means trained coordination between workers,
34 September 2022 | Automation
automated systems and software to drive high-speed, high-volume warehouse execution.
2. Newer forms of automation are being evaluated and adopted with growing urgency There are also signals that newer forms of
automation, such as robotic palletising/ depalletising and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), are also being rapidly adopted. For example, a recent Interact Analysis report showed the mobile robot market will grow from $3.6bn in 2021 to $18bn in 2025. AMRs provide signifi cant productivity
automationmagazine.co.uk
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