Autonomous mobile units are now the best way to move materials and products around the warehouse or production facility. These devices have become more reliable and the cost has come down to a level that is very palatable. The brains of an automated guided vehicle (AGV) is the programs that run to give the vehicle instructions about what it should do, when it should do it, and how it should do it. The programs or software as they are called, has come a long way in the world of guided vehicles. Now the vehicles are able to achieve amazing production levels of several hundred cases per hour with great accuracy. The AGV has reduced the amount of movement of materials and products that is required in a facility. In previous production facilities, fork lifts would bring empty bottles on pallets to the production line to be filled. There was always a full pallet load, no matter the number of bottles needed for the production run. So the fork lifts would make trips back and forth to bring full loads for the start of a production run and take back partial pallet loads to the warehouse once the production run was complete. The AGV eliminates all this “back and forth” by bringing exactly the correctly number of bottles when they are needed to the production line.
There has been an increasing demand for flexibility and intelligence in the way the AGV does its work in the warehouse and plant. When a warehouse becomes automated the cost to handle each product goes way down as compared to the cost per unit in the traditional manual warehouse. The flexibility of the material handling automation does this, while the manual operation cannot reduce the cost at all. The number of units moved in an automated facility is significantly higher than the number handled in a manual operation. Flexibility is also the reason that automation can effectively respond to changes in requirements of movements in the distribution facility. It is very easy to re-configure the areas of the floor plan so that automated material handling can perform efficient movements with a new job. It is also very easy to accumulate programs that give the automation instructions of how to do the work. When a new material handling job needs to start, the new program is loaded into the controller and the job starts. Traditional material handling systems are much more rigid, and are difficult to re-configure for a new material handling scenario. The return on investment for automation is much easier to achieve, while the ROI for a traditional material handling system can take longer to actually return because of its inflexibility.
Automated material handling is the best way to handle the explosion of new products that have to be stocked in a warehouse now. The increase in the number of new products causes an increase in the amount of floor space to store them in the warehouse. When orders come into the warehouse it is very difficult for traditional material handling systems to be able to effectively fill those orders when the products are so numerous and are scattered in various locations. Automation finds it easier to fill orders that that are various products in various amounts because of the flexibility that automation has. Usually every order that comes into the warehouse now is completely different from any other order, so flexibility is required to do the filling job efficiently.
As technology has driven the design of robotics, the automated material handling devices now work better if they are part of a total system that is designed as a turnkey solution for the warehouse. These systems can be laid out using the value stream map to determine what are the required parts of the system that is needed by the warehouse in question. One part of the map would detail the automated receipt of products from the manufacturers. This would be followed by the placement of products in their designated storage areas. Orders would be received that need to be filled. There will be software detailed in the VSM that will be used to determine the order that products are loaded onto a pallet or pallets to fill the order to be shipped. An AGV would be dispatched into the warehouse to retrieve the products in the order that is required for loading the pallets. These vehicles have a map of the warehouse facility at their disposal. The AGV will decide autonomously how to get to the location of each product. If the way is blocked that was chosen first, the device will determine a different way on its own. Palletizing is a part of the design of this efficient system. After all the products for a given pallet are stacked, the entire pallet is stretch wrapped with plastic by robotics for protection during shipping.
Benefits from automated material handling can come in small pieces like saving employees backs, but the benefits also stretch out to cover larger areas as well. In some cases the efficiency that is created by automated material handling can cause a company to consolidate its warehouse operations into one or two distribution locations down from the 6 or 7 that were used previously. This creates a major cost savings for a company. Some automated material handling systems include overhead robotics that pick products from floor locations and deliver them to the pallet location. These are very speedy and quite accurate. Sometimes the robotics are combined with the manufacturing operation to take a food product from its manufacturing point into packaging, then into palletizing before shipping to the retail location for sales. Be aware that automated material handling systems can be configured to do all that is required in the warehouse or distribution center.
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