Maximize Your Output with Warehouse Automation Solutions
Booming of E-Commerce and retail sector globally is driving ratification of technology. Robots, high speed sorters, wearable devices or smart glasses for faster pick-ups are the efficient use of the trending topics in logistics sector. Therefore, warehouse automation is in trend these days and outstanding topic everybody wants to analyse as a demonstration of their technological and process efficiency.
However, there is a specific embarrassment in India. It is a crucial to figure out trade-off cautiously between using human workforce and machine. However, the cost of automation may not change much between nations such as Japan and India. The pay-back period of 2-3 years in Japan, becomes 8-10 years in India due to the availability and cost of labour.
This was a restraint in redistributing in warehousing companies in India. However, the expanding service level demand of e-commerce warehouse services /retail with greatly distorted operational needs, has gravelled the way for Indian companies to go for automation.
Basic Automation: It is an important to analyse a dilemma to find out automation need in any setup.
You require searching out monotonous tasks that employ large amount of time or those that usually drive to errors. Once you search those key factors in the process, you can start to think about automating them.
Secondly, there is a requirement to get the importance of automation. The main goal of automation is to expand output thereby improving profitability of operation, minimize errors, raise-up for peak volumes and maximize the safety of operation.
We are in a world in which digital and IOT is the coming step on that journey providing better customer practices and assisting companies accomplish a competitive advantage.
Automation Leads to Opportunities
- Rising Up – You can rise up volume or through put of the 3PL warehouse with arrangement of automation in the warehouse. There is no need to going through pain of moving existing third party warehouse to a larger one.
- Asymmetric Handling – Automation in the 3PL WMS can improve efficiency of the company to manage extreme peaks without any dependencies on labour.
- Labour Enhancement – Adding automation systems support workers in their tasks although eliminating the repetitive, unproductive, `Low to No’ value, decline in fatigue conditions of their jobs. These workers can be qualified and can be used more efficiently.
High-End Automation
Some of the challenges to be defeated are specified below-
- Selection of Right Product – In current situation, there are abundance of automation products available in the market for every operation in the warehouse services. But one should recognize which one is the best appropriate for the process, because products that works well for one company, may not be convenient for the other. Therefore, organizing the right team to take call on automation product is very important; and availability of such skilled resource is very limited.
- Store house Working – Any organization moving to automation must look at supply chain as a complete umbrella & not just a warehouse. If your strenuous suppliers can execute certain actions more cost effectively than you can at your warehouse, then your associate should perform these tasks and you should pay them a little extra. Likewise, if p executing certain tasks at your warehouse results in compelling labour savings downstream, then all these tasks should be done at your warehouse service provider.
- Ever-Changing Business Need – With persistent changes in SKUs, including of new products, changes or variation in demands, there is direct effect on design of automated system developed for warehouse inventory management. Therefore, it is very necessary that you design automation system acknowledging future demand of operation. Also, automation system should be efficiently extensible & commutable, so that any variations in business can be catered evenly & efficiently.
- Change Management – The most challenging thing in starting automation in any warehouse is change management, because business activities, work flows require to be revise with starting of automation. This means that all workers who are involved in warehouse solution require to learn as well as comply to new activities. As a human tendency, there is always hesitation to change and lot of people come legitimizing, how present processes are simple & effective.
Taking deliberation of the above specified challenges it makes sense to begin small and build a extensible solution. The way to advanced automation includes moving through each level of automation ultimately as the business grow. While you build the first upgrade decision, you should think forward and pick an automation solution that is extensible and can be conveniently integrated with future solutions.