When to Implement Warehouse Automation

Does your current warehouse or distribution center have an order fulfillment process that requires repetitive time-consuming or task-oriented processes? What about lengthy walking distances for order pickers to retrieve orders? If this sounds like your current warehouse, it may be time to consider implementing automation.

Automation aids in warehouse optimization. Automation not only increases picking accuracy but also frees up workers from those repetitive tasks which can improve employee productivity.

How to Evaluate if Your Operation Will Benefit from Automation

Effectively adding automation into your warehouse or distribution center starts with an analysis of your product storage and picking and staging characteristics.

When deciding if automation is right for you, it’s crucial to calculate your warehouse’s inventory, processes, and growth levels by SKU. Identifying certain characteristics of your inventory and processes will allow you to pinpoint where in your operation that could benefit from a faster, more automated process.

Things to be considered include:

• Do the products require special material handling equipment operated by an employee? If so, automation can speed up the handling of these products and free up that employee for other functions within the distribution center.
• Does your inventory require separate picking and staging zones because of varying weight and shape? These areas can be separate but should work together harmoniously. If there’s a lag in one of these areas, including the ‘in-between’ area of getting the products from picking to staging, then you are wasting valuable time and energy. Adding automation can make a dramatic difference in this case.
• Would you benefit from increased order accuracy? Using automated picking systems, you may see pick rates improve over 30% as well as an impressive reduction in picking errors of up to 60%.
• Do your employees spend a large amount of time simply traveling to and from pick locations? Automated systems, including good-to-person solutions, can dramatically increase pick rates by bringing the product to them vs. them traveling to the pick location.

INDUSTRIAL STEEL RACKING: AN INTRODUCTION TO STORAGE SYSTEMS (I)

When we talk about storage we refer to a set of processes aimed to store and preserve our stock in an optimize condition, ready to use, that span from the moment the goods are produced to the moment those goods are requested by our customers. Industrial racking provides the necessary equipment to receive, store and ship raw materials, in-process products, and finished goods. Needless to say, that depending on the type of the material to be stored, the racking specification, as well as the handling technology, may vary.

As a preliminary step to the design of the storage system and industrial racking, it is necessary to consider the specification of the materials to be stored, like dimensions, weight, durability or economic aspects.