The Best Practices in Automating Your Warehouse Operations

 

If you are looking at little automation in your warehouse this is the best practice to lookout. If you are automating your warehouse in terms of conveyors or sorters or even robots it would make a lot of sense to mark your SKUs as conveyable or not conveyable, sortable or non-sortable and as the robots coming everywhere robotable or non-robotable. The last thing you want to do is make a small product or a big product ride the conveyor. Technically all conveyors have certain requirements mentioned, such as the box size of certain length, width, and height.  The carton’s matching these requirements can only convey through the conveyor. The same requirements for sorting the products using sorter. It could be whatever type of sorter that you might have big sorter or small sorter and even robots. The only difference between robots and conveyors is the businesses. Before it used to change every five to seven years and now the changes happening even faster. Imagine either your volume picked up or you’re handling much bigger volume because your business has picked up or your business is changing. Before it used to be all retail now it’s all ecomm, before you used to handle all cases, but now you are handling units, which means your business have changed. That means you have to change your process and your layout has to change. 

If you had these roller conveyors, imagine ripping that off and then redoing the layout completely. That’s a lot of work and it’s very expensive to take it off and then put it to construct in a new manner. You may not be able to reuse the same thing, you may have to buy brand new conveyor equipment. So all those things are the drawbacks with the old-school mounts fixed on the floor mounted, on the wall mounted, on the roof. Things have changed now and the robots are configurable, which means you can quickly configure, program, and change the way the robot works. I mean before it was going to let’s say from here to here and now when we need to change it, you can easily change it anyway. It could be a guided vehicle which goes around by scanning the barcodes on the floor or it’s doing something else completely automated like an automatic car or something like. A lidar based sensor reads the data and then it detects on obstacles and then finds the way and then keeps going. Robots are very easy to reconfigure and reprogram. They can be made to go in a completely different direction or to make it do something else. That’s the appeal of robots and also the cost of all these sensors and the electronics have come down significantly which makes the robots and affordable option in a DC environment. 

warehouse-automation-best-practices

Also the labor shortage is a much bigger problem that’s making these robots come fast as well. Having said that it makes a lot of sense to mark your items as a non-conveyable, conveyable, non sortable, sortable, robotable, and non-robotable. That means whenever you’re processing those items in your WMS processes you can mark that off and then it can be isolated as a separate carton or a separate thing or you can remove that or even it could be a separate order. Depending on how you are receiving that order you could split that and process that separately and then ship that separately or just isolating makes everything so much easier. 

So efficiency wise you’re still doing all the other things efficiently for your conveyable products, sortable products, robotable products but the non conveyable, the non-sortable and the non-robotable get isolated and then processed separately. You could have a non conveyable isle you could have a non-sortable isle and also a non-robotable aisle and have all those items slotted there. You can then process them separately, which makes it easy because it’s not coming in the way of the regular items and then creating a bottleneck. Isolating and processing them separately makes it easy and your regular items still go through the regular efficiency. That’s something to think about so hopefully this is helpful and please share your thoughts and share your comments in the section below.

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Originally published at Smartgladiator.com on Oct 9, 2019.

10
Oct 2019
By Puga SankaraLeave a comment
Author:
Puga Sankara
About:
Puga Sankara is the Founder, CEO of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator LoadProof has been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. SG LoadProof is a patent pending Centralized Enterprise Photo/Video Document System on Cloud for Supply Chain. SG LP is built on the fact that photos & videos are vital docs as important as POs/SOs/Legal Contracts/Fulfillment Orders that reside in ERP/WMS/TMS systems, that serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal proof of crucial, critical, vital operations executed in Supply Chain within/across orgs when fulfilling customer orders as well as meeting contractual obligations between orgs as merchandise is transferred between different parties that partake in Supply Chain functions & operations. And these photos/videos data should not be stored in someone’s Smartphone or Email Inbox or in their personal/work Computer, but should be stored in a Centralized Enterprise system, where such data can be pushed into super-fast, stored securely, accessible to all stake holders (CFO/Sales Reps/Customer Support/AR/AP) in an org, as well as facilitates super-fast retrieval/sharing. LP is an Enterprise System of record for Photo/Video docs & is as important as an ERP which is an enterprise system of record for POs, SOs, Legal Contracts between parties etc. that have huge legal ramifications, also as important as a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that hold indispensable shipment & fulfillment data on orders. Like how Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc. have evolved into social media platforms/systems that enable individuals to showcase their beauty/pretty clothes/lovely cosmetics/hep coolness etc., LoadProof is an Enterprise system that holds similar photos/videos, but for a different reason, not for show off, but to serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal & indisputable system of record and proof that can be presented even in the court of law, when there is a dispute between parties while they execute many facets of the Supply Chain functions & operations. SG LoadProof is also an Enterprise System of Record for Photos, videos and any other digital documents for your Supply Chain Network. A system of record (SOR) or source system of record (SSoR) is a data management term for an information storage system (commonly implemented on a computer system running a database management system) that is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. The need to identify systems of record can become acute in organizations where management information systems have been built by taking output data from multiple source systems, re-processing this data, and then re-presenting the result for new business use. In these cases, multiple information systems may disagree about the same piece of information. These disagreements may stem from semantic differences, differences in opinion, use of different sources, and differences in the timing of the extract, transform, and load processes that create the data they report against, or may simply be the result of bugs. The integrity and validity of any data set is open to question when there is no traceable connection to a good source, such as a known System of Record. Where the integrity of the data is vital, if there is an agreed system of record, the data element must either be linked to, or extracted directly from it. In other cases, the provenance and estimated data quality should be documented. The “system of record” approach is a good fit for environments where both: 1. there is a single authority over all data consumers, and 2. all consumers have similar needs Here, LoadProof is the System of Record for pictures and videos for all the entities in Supply chain who uses pictures and videos to track using any Supply Chain System infrastructure. 1. LoadProof provides accurate, thorough, complete, and latest information in pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply chain that is tracked. 2. LoadProof is the single authority on pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply Chain that is tracked 3. LoadProof doesn’t let any external system to copy the records being stored in it, which eliminates the data being duplicated in multiple places to preserve the data integrity and credibility. 4. LoadProof has a secured login procedure which lets only users with select level access to view the data and modify the records which helps in maintaining LoadProof is becoming the Industry Standard System for Photo & Video Docs for Supply Chain Smart Gladiator is located in ATDC - Advanced Tech Dev Center (tech Incubator) in Georgia Institute of Tech. Click for a demo - https://loadproof.com/apply Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 25 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com. [Read More]
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