Tips for warehouse automation to maximise output

  • Articles
  • Sep 18,19
With growth in manufacturing sector in India, dependency on logistics partners is on rise. Today logistics does not merely comprise of transportation of goods rather it also enables the manufacturers to stock and distribute.
Tips for warehouse automation to maximise output

With growth in manufacturing sector in India, dependency on logistics partners is on rise. Today logistics does not merely comprise of transportation of goods rather it also enables the manufacturers to stock and distribute. Sushil Rathi takes through what are some key things to look at while having an automation solution.
 
Boom in the E-Commerce 
sector worldwide is driving adoption of technology. Use of robots, high speed sorters, wearable devices or smart glasses for faster pick-ups is in the news.  Therefore, warehouse automation is in buzz these days and everyone wants to explore it as a demonstration of their technological and process capabilities. However, there is a particular dilemma in India. We have to carefully evaluate trade-off between using human labour and machine. It would be pertinent to point out that the cost of automation may not vary much between nations such as Japan and India. But the pay-back period of 2-3 years in Japan, becomes 8-10 years in India due to the cost and availability of labour. This was a deterrent in deploying automation in Indian warehouse. However, the increasing service level demand of e-commerce with extremely skewed operation requirement compels Indian companies to go for automation. 
 
The world is becoming ever-more digital and IoT is the next step on that journey – delivering better customer practices and helping organizations achieve a competitive advantage.It is very important to identify a problem to find out automation requirement in any setup. Warehouse operators need to find out repetitive tasks that consume large amount of time or those that commonly lead to errors. Once these points are found in process, operators then can start to think about automating them. For instance, basic automation such as racking, use of MHEs, use of Warehouse Management System, use of bar-codes / scanning can be implemented and can save costs.Secondly, it needs to be understood why automation is important. With any amount of automation, the goal is to increase profitability of operation, reduce errors, scale-up for peaks and increase the safety of operation. Some benefits of automation are lower rentals due saving space, reduction in labour cost due to better productivity or replacing manual work by machine, efficient material flow, safe operation, reduction in inventory, and reduced operating cost.
 
With deployment of automation in a warehouse can scale up capacity or throughput of the warehouse without going through pain of shifting existing warehouse to a bigger one. It enhances capability of the company to handle extreme peaks without any dependencies on labour. Adding automation systems in a warehouse supports workers in their tasks while removing the monotonous, non-productive, ‘low to no’ value, reduction in fatigue or mistake-prone aspects of their jobs. Workers can be trained and can be used more effectively.
 
Key challenges to overcome
  • Selection of right product: Now-a-days, there are diversified automation products available in market for every process in the warehouse. But one should identify which one is best suitable for the operation, because things that works well for one organisation, may create disaster for the other. Therefore, forming the right team to take call on automation product is very critical; and availability of such trained resource is very scarce.
  • Silo working: Any company going for automation must look at supply chain as a complete umbrella & not just a warehouse. If your upstream suppliers can perform certain activities more cost effectively than you can at your warehouse, trust your partners to perform these tasks and you should pay them a little extra.  Similarly, if performing certain tasks at your warehouse (for a marginal increase in labour costs) results in significant labour savings downstream (e.g., faster receiving and shelf replenishment at the stores), then those tasks should be done at your warehouse.
  • Ever changing business requirements: With frequent changes in SKUs, addition of new products, changes or fluctuation in demands, there is direct impact on design of automated system developed for warehouse. Therefore, it is very important that you design automation system considering future demand of operation. Also, automation system should be easily scalable & modular, so that any changes in business can be catered smoothly & efficiently. 
  • Change Management: One of major challenge in implementing automation in any warehouse is change management, because business processes, work flows need to be rewritten with implementation of automation. This means that all manpower involved in the warehouse operation has to learn as well as adhere to new processes. As a human tendency, there is always reluctance to change and lot of people come justifying, how current processes are simple & efficient. Considering above, it may make sense to initiate as small and build a scalable solution. The path to advanced automation sometimes involves going through each level of automation sequentially as the business matures. When making the first upgrade decision, you should think ahead and pick an automation solution that is scalable and can be easily integrated with future solutions.
Sushil Rathi is COO at Mahindra Logistics, has an experience of over 28 years in diverse fields like sales, distribution, marketing, channel management, supply chain management and IT consulting. He has been associated with industries like automobile, consumer goods and E-commerce.

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