Letter from the province – Automation faster, better and stronger

The industry is booming, this goes both for the automation industry that targets automation within the warehouse and for the packaging automation industry. 

Automation can make your logistics more efficient and faster. Retailers are changing the operation to omnichannel often with the help of automation and e-commerce with it’s high volume of small orders are early adopters of automation in all different shapes and sizes. 

When we talk about automation in logistics, what do we mean? From a process perspective we take one process and optimize it to make it more efficient.  The interesting part comes next, the way we do it is that we mechanise it, in other words we use equipment to make it faster and more efficient. 

The decision to mechanize the logistics will improve the company’s ability to deliver, but at the same time we are changing the characteristics of the logistics part of the supply chain. These new properties are quite natural, but if we fail to consider them when we make the decision to automate we could be in for a nasty surprise down the road.

The new characteristics we get are mostly dependant on the properties of the selected solution and how we will be using it. Examples of characteristics are; 

• Top Speed. All equipment have its top speed and we need to work with it. It is normally not possible to through loads of people at it and get an increase of output. The most common solution is to extent the working times during peaks, and we need to know how that affects your customer promise and/or your forwarders pick up deadlines.
• Changes. A mechanized solution will make it harder to handle changes. Volume increase are normally the easy one, almost all solution can be extended by purchasing more robots/shuttles/racking but do not forget to consider the required lead times to get it in production. Changes of the order structure and/or customer packaging could be much harder to handle and here it is vital to talk about possible future scenarios before you select a specific solution and then consider the scenarios when you evaluate different solutions/suppliers. The same goes for how much we want to automate, if we only start with automating the storage and want to automate the picking and/or the packaging process, different solutions are easier or harder to extend with these extra processes.

A decision to automate is not to be taken lightly, at the same time we need to keep moving forward and by knowing and working with all the characteristics in our new automation we lower the investment risk and get faster, better and stronger.

Searching for awesomeness to deliver results and empoverment

Adviser and Project Management within Supply Chain, Warehousing, Whse processes, Distribution and Automation.

anders.anderberg@edgelogx.com