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WAREHOUSING, HANDLING & STORAGE
CALLING ‘ORDER’ ON INBOUND GOODS
major food retailers are surely the textbook case for extensive and profitable automation. Dependence on manual operations is looking
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increasingly unsustainable. Post Covid mitigation measures have introduced inefficiencies, recruitment is tough as the gap between the wage rates the food chain can afford and the salaries available elsewhere is growing, in contrast to the levels of skill, capability and commitment offered by those who are prepared to work for the money. Meanwhile, margins are shrinking in a highly competitive market faced with the ‘cost of living crisis’. And yet in 90 per cent of grocery DCs across
Britain and Ireland, manual operations are still all-pervasive, and where the supermarkets have invested in automation the benefits and the returns on investment are often underwhelming. What is going wrong?
FEEDING THE BEAST It is not the technology. From the simplest conveyors to robotic arms and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), automation continues to become smarter, faster, more capable, more flexible, even more energy-efficient. The problem lies not with the appetites of the automation, but in how we feed the robotic beast.
ith floor areas measured in hectares, carrying tens of thousands of SKUs to supply the daily needs of 67 million people, the distribution centres of our
Because, in a strange way, the robots are
only ‘human’. Like us, they work most consistently and efficiently when presented with standard, predictable, ordered tasks. When the job is random or chaotic, even the latest advances in sensors, vision systems, artificial intelligence struggle – indeed, often human workers are better at creating order from chaos. Which is why even in relatively highly automated facilities there are many workers purely engaged in sorting goods so that they feed the right piece of automation in the right order at the right time. This in turn arises because of the haphazard way in which incoming goods are received from suppliers. Too often there is no standardisation or uniformity in the way goods are received, even from one supplier let alone across the supply base. Arriving in a mix of roll cages, totes, pallets,
boxes, bags, goods destined for quite different routes through the DC are often mixed promiscuously. ‘Zero day’ goods, or consignments that should be cross-docked for immediate onward shipment, are in the same cage as goods that will be held for days; robust and heavy cartons of dry goods alongside (or on top of) the perishable or the delicate. There is little consistency in how labels and bar codes are presented. Even the distinction between ambient, chilled and frozen may be only loosely observed and within those categories, while surely no supplier would put cooked meats adjacent to raw chicken, lesser sins are regularly committed.
Supermarkets face a pressing need to automate their DCs. But first, they must put their inbound processes in good order. Dan Migliozzi, sales and marketing director, at independent systems integrator, Invar Group, gets to the root of the problem.
10 JUNE 2024 | FACTORY&HANDLINGSOLUTIONS
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