Warehouses of the future - What it takes to reach there? Part II
In my previous blog (link below), I had touched upon what it takes built an automated warehouse and had received numerous responses on the how the road to this automation will look like.
http://www.infosysblogs.com/supply-chain/2009/04/warehouses_of_the_future_what.html#more
Yes, automation will do take place eventually, but there are many dynamics associated with it.
I do agree with Arun that the human factor will still be around even deep into the future, but yes, that will depend on the level of automation one is opting for. I am not saying that all warehouses will be eventually transformed into automated ones in the future. This blog is about those which will and what it will take for them to be one. As Sudharshan rightly pointed out, there will be a lot of factors that will decide a warehouse to jump into the automation bandwagon. At the end of the day, automation must really need to be justified. The prime hindrance to move in this direction is cost of these equipments. If the technology innovates cost effective process to build these equipments plus the demand for these increases in the years to come, we can see more business adopting complete automation.
Yes Geetha, such warehouses do exist and they are a few service providers who do erect them. You would be surprised to hear that one such warehouse does exits in India.
I do agree with Partha that adoption of automation is also geographically dependant. It is a straight equation; if you labour cost is far lower than the cost of automation, you will never go for it. But again, there are other things to factor in, like picking speed and accuracy, item velocity and of course, the capital available to invest.Now let’s get back to what this blog was meant for in the first place: what it takes to have a fully automated warehouse. Ideally, such a warehouse needs to be built from scratch, meaning it would be much easier to create one than to modify an existing one since it would require a lot of dismantling of existing structures. Locations would need to be designed with perfect alignment with picking robots to have error free Putaway and Picking operations. Vertical and Horizontal railing systems, that would guide the robot to each location available on the aisle that it operates on. Precision is the key to during design and erection and any mistake would lead to serious error during live run.
Now on the WMS part, let’s look at the receiving operation. When an ASN is received by the host system and sent to the WMS, it checks the kind of items that are coming in and does a quick assessment of the space available in warehouse based on the putaway rules for each item. It then needs to carry out a space optimization task, by transferring all available cases to locations next to each other, so as to reduce the honey combing effect. The robots do this quickly and free up a large number of locations within the zones. This is done before the goods arrive at the warehouse, so that Putaway time is drastically reduced. The system does all of this on its own, yes the WMS would do it. Here is the difference, it does not print a Putaway task, nor does it create a work order to be assigned to a picker on his handheld, etc. It just instructs the specified robot/s to carry out the required operation. In the same way, there are many such tasks that we can touch upon that would not remain the same as it is now in the case of manual or semi automated warehouses. More of this in my next blog.
