Flexible Warehouse – the next frontier?

We are nowadays talking about Flexible Warehouse - where a flexible workforce would handle flexible production with the help of flexible automation giving an increased production output to handle the rapid changes to meet the demand.

Consumers at Forefront

The evolution of consumerism in conjunction with the explosion of e-commerce has profoundly impacting material handling automation. Warehouses, distribution centers, and fulfillment centers earlier used to maintain a straightforward focus on shipping full pallets and larger units, but e-commerce created the need to ship goods at case, split-case, each, and even item levels.

And add to it, the need for omni-channel fulfillment and customer’s expectation on faster deliveries. As a result, materials handling automation strategies and operations at many distribution centers have undergone radical change. 

Robots to the Rescue

This shift means that warehouse automation solutions must be equipped to effectively and efficiently handle e-commerce order patterns - typically a higher volume of orders, each with a small number of items. To achieve the desired materials handling automation flexibility, many companies are turning to mobile robotic systems.

Instead of warehouse workers going to find the product, the product comes to the workers. In short, rather than adapting your facility and operations to automation, Flexible Automation adapts to you.

The case for Automation

From flexible shuttle systems to robotics equipped with embedded intelligence to automatic guided vehicles (AGVs), warehouses and DCs around the globe are becoming a hotbed for automation implementation and experimentation. But at its core, automation revolves around identifying repetitive tasks that are process-oriented, time-consuming, or error-prone, and finding ways to automate them.

Mobile Autonomous Robots

Traditional automated guided vehicles and carts (AGVs and AGCs) act as distributed conveyor belt systems, carrying items along well-defined paths. The next generation of this mobile automation will be based on autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). The AMRs have the intelligence and the on-board sensor suite to learn (or be taught) to navigate a known structured environment.

Goods-to-person picking robots – typically carry carts and can be programmed to travel flexible routes in the warehouse to move product between workers and stations. They feature a navigation laser, front and rear scanners, and visual and acoustic warning indicators that enable it to safely move around a warehouse in the vicinity of human workers. 

Drone-based cycle counts - Lightweight unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) equipped with RFID-scanning technology offer real-time inventory visibility in the warehouse. These machines can conduct their own inventory sweeps autonomously at schedules determined by the warehouse. Sensors and algorithms enable collision prevention and an intuitive design that enables it to adopt flight patterns to unique layouts and to navigate cluttered environments.

Picking Automation

Picking and palletizing make up to 60% of warehouse operational costs. New technologies are changing boundaries all the time and with robots being able to take over more and more tasks from operators.

Automated Picking - is the implementation of robotic technologies that can pick, process, consolidate, and prepare orders in warehouses. The Items are accurately identified from the MSU using sophisticated machine vision algorithms. Identified items are then accurately grasped from a densely packed MSU using a collaborative robotic arm and a set of complaint grippers. Finally, they are dropped in totes or corrugated boxes after the barcode is scanned and sent for packing. The system is best fit for e-commerce warehouse automation as it works collaboratively with a human operator to fulfill orders, increasing picking productivity from the same workstation.

Mobile App Picking - A smartphone or tablet equipped with a mobile app that elucidates instructions so that it’s easy to walk the user through his or her job functions – even offers a view of the item that’s expected to be picked so that temporary workers [who may not be familiar with the inventory] can ensure they’re picking the right item.

Pick-to-Light Systems

Pick-to-Light (PTL) warehouse automation uses lights above racks or bins to direct pickers where to pick. The user simply scans a barcode on a picking container. Then a light above the rack or bin illuminates with the picking quantity, and the user picks the items for the order, corroborating the pick by pressing the light.

PTL system helps to increase overall fulfillment capacity, especially in an e-commerce environment, and when coupled with batch or multi-order picking it tends to able to meet peak season demand, which are sometimes all the way up to 20 times the average demand.

Warehouses Process ripe for Automation

	INBOUND	CONSOLIDATION	REPLENISHMENT	OUTBOUND
Warehouse Process	Unloading Conveying Case Movers	Order Picking Order Consolidation Order Packing	Stock Lean-time Put to Store	Post-Pick Tugging Parcel Shipping Pallet Conveying
Automation Process	Autonomous Robots	Autonomous Picking Pick-to-Light system	Autonomous Robots Pick-to-Light system	Autonomous Robots

Warehouse Automation Benefits

Warehouse automation solutions help optimize operations and efficiencies by performing redundant tasks that are typically performed by operators in a manual operation, which may include waiting, travel time and motion. When implemented correctly, automation allows operators to focus on the tasks that require human intervention and leaves the other tasks to the equipment.

Another advantage of implementing warehouse automation is that it reduces a warehouse’s dependency on labor, especially in the face of the ever-increasing talent shortage. Additionally, in some countries, regulations are very strict, limiting, for instance, the amount of weight that each worker can lift every day.

Another factor is that many young workers have a disillusioned view of the warehouse as being a generally unattractive place to work. Automation may help reverse this trend because, the more automation a warehouse employs, the more employees are needed to operate and maintain the equipment as opposed to suffering through the repetitive bending and lifting in a traditional manual warehouse.