Summary
The economic numbers are expanding in a mammoth way. Various business sectors are hunting for multiple advancements to boost up the verticals operational frameworks. This blog provides you a valuable piece of information on how warehouse automation adds value in 2021.
written For
Warehouse Automation Manager can provide better insight into how artificial intelligence changes warehouses’ workflow and how their job can be made easier with AI advancements.
The Operations Specialist manages to optimize day-to-day activities by automating the processes.
Business Strategists can outline strategic plans to reach their goals and targets to gain maximum profit.
The boom of warehouse automation
Are you suffering from delayed order delivery, declining customer satisfaction, workforce utilization issues, inaccurate inventory counts, and error-prone manual processes?
It’s high time you automate your warehouse!
Brace yourself. You are going to see a significant uptick in eCommerce orders in 2021. Yes, Statista predicts that e-retail revenues will grow to over $6.54 trillion in 2022. The pandemic triggered social distancing laid the perfect track, making online shopping the most popular activity worldwide.
So, gear up for the future. Replace/integrate your legacy systems with the latest warehouse automation software powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Benefits of warehouse automation
Today, modern warehouses focus more on value-added services, just-in-time inventory, order customization, and rapid process flow rather than just traditional storage.
Deploying AI-led warehouse automation solutions helps both modern and legacy warehouses not just to reduce errors. It can offer your business some of the key benefits listed below.
- Increases warehouse throughput, transparency, and profitability
- Results in better price fixation, resource utilization, and space optimization
- Lowers cost of operation, handling, storage, and labor
- Improves customer service, employee productivity, and work efficiency
- Augments precision in data documentation and analytics
- Reduces stockout events and inventory loss
- Offers greater inventory control and workplace safety
- Enhances material handling and order fulfillment accuracy
AI-led automation solutions that add value
A perfect warehouse automation solution simplifies receiving, dimensioning, sorting, putting away, packaging, returning, replenishing, and shipping.
Let us delve into critical AI-based warehouse automation solutions that will get you ready for 2021.
Automated dimensioning solutions
Future-ready warehouses deploy automated dimensioning systems as they accelerate efficiencies in quality control, slotting, packaging, cartonization, and shipping. As most e-retail players adopt dimensional weight pricing, warehouses are compelled to deploy tools that measure exact dimensions; This holds good not just for regular-shaped items but also for irregular ones with troughs and protrusions. Warehouses cannot afford to have erroneous measurements that will result in a loss of revenue and trust.
Automating dimensioning and the weighing system saves money, drives margins and profitability by documenting the right measurements without errors or delays. Accurate measurement data enhances storage density that makes warehouses as compact and ergonomic as possible.
Perfectly compatible with conveyors and other machinery, automated dimensioners measure the height, breadth, width, and weight in no time. Their high-speed printing capability enables quick scanning, weighing, and processing for carton labels. Shipping a truckload or cubing out pallets with automated dimensioners can save substantial time, cost, and effort.
Benefits of deploying automated dimensioning systems in warehouses include:
- Enhanced cartonization
- Better quality control
- Increased future planning capacity
- Improves the dimensional precision
- Eliminates the manual errors
- Boosts warehouses’ potency
Also Read on Blog: Why your warehouses need dimensioning and weighing solutions in 2021.
Autonomous vehicles and robots
Intra-warehouse travel time can take over 50% of working hours. It is quite an expensive activity that can result in damages, space wastage, and time delay if done manually.
Using autonomous mobile robots and vehicles rapidly increases the efficiency of moving inventory from stock locations to fulfill customer orders. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV), Autonomous Robotic Forklifts, Articulated Robotic Arms, and Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (AS/RS) help warehouses and distribution centers to move, store, and deliver orders accurately without human involvement. AS/RS alone has the potential to increase order accuracy to 99.99%.
They can quickly scale up and down based on the urgency of orders. These robots eliminate costly errors and boost productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability. They handle repetitive tasks and allow employees to focus on jobs that demand human intelligence.
Here are a few types of autonomous mobile robots which can be more helpful in the coming days in the warehouse industry:
- Cobotics: Currently, several warehouses have forklifts to unload the pallet and rake it in the raking system to replace the process. Cobotics can be a suitable replacement for the forklifts since it helps move pallets from one location to another.
- Floor cleaner robots: The messy warehouse can be a huge pitfall, especially during the order fulfillment processes. We can deploy floor cleaner robots to sanitize and clean the floor continuously without warehouse employees.
Autonomous, self-driving vehicles expedite and ease shipping by efficiently transporting inventory between warehouses, manufacturers, retailers, and customers.
Drones
Strengthening the post-pandemic supply chain, drones are brilliant flying devices that improve the quality of warehouse operations. They help in conducting surveillance and carrying products in the air. These Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) use optical sensors to upgrade warehouse and logistics processes.
Capable of saving hundreds of person-hours by scanning and moving up to 50 times faster than conventional methods, drones are a safer alternative to labor-intensive forklifts, man-cages, and scissor-lifts. From a considerable distance spanning several meters, drones can swiftly locate an item, scan RFID tags, gauge inventory levels, and transfer data directly to the Warehouse Management System. By working 24/7, they accelerate order delivery and warehouse productivity.
Conclusion
To quickly scale-up the business, we need to deploy automation technology that best fits your vertical. For warehouses, top carriers use the dimensional (DIM) weight to estimate the transport charges. Centering the fact, most warehouses have deployed the automated dimensioning system to drive new measurement standards within the parcel industries.
Ready to automate your warehouse and increase your profitability?
If you want to transform into a value-driven, innovative, and future-ready warehouse, get in touch with us.
Automate your warehouse operations with vMeasure Parcel Pro
vMeasure Parcel Pro is an AI vision-based automated dimensioning solution developed from the ground up to measure the dimensional measurements and DIM weight of the parcels of different sizes and shapes. This solution aims to assist 3pl, distribution, shipping companies, and warehouse companies with order fulfillment. These automated dimensioning solutions two different ranges such as vMeasure Parcel Pro S200 for warehouses and 3PLs’ and Parcel Pro S100 for order fulfillment centers. In a nutshell, the vMeasure automated dimensioning solution can help grow your business by improving your warehouse’s space efficiency. In a nutshell, the vMeasure Parcel pro, the automated dimensioning solution, can boost your business by enhancing your warehouse’s space efficiency and profitability.
