One of the main reasons that you would want to set up a system of warehouse automation in your company should be to cut the cost of moving raw materials and finished goods in your manufacturing plant. There are other reasons that can be supporting this main reason, like making the job of being a warehouse worker easier and more productive or having raw materials get to the production line on time to keep production on schedule. When you look at the main reason of cutting costs, you can be assured if you ever can start the process of planning for warehouse automation then actually implement it, you will get a short-term turn-around for the investment that you make here.
Once warehouse automation is in place and running in your plant you can see the significant impact it has. You can have an immediate savings in the manpower cost that is required to move stuff to and from the warehouse. There can be a variation in the amount of savings that you can gain here. If you have implemented a conveyor type system, you may have savings, but if have implemented a system using automated guided vehicles, you may realize very significant savings in manpower costs. You will certainly gain faster cycle times from your warehouse to the production facility with either implementation. This will make the production operation be more reliable due to better accessibility to raw materials and more consistent movement of finished goods away from the production area.
The reduction in the time and labor involved in the production of products can help to reduce the cost of products to customers. Customers can be very fickle and will switch brands at the slightest notion about price change or delivery change. With improved production cycles you should be able to improve your delivery of products to the customer. This should help you in customer retention, improving customer loyalty to your products. During your planning phase for warehouse automation you should strive to have speed of raw material and finished goods movement through your plant as a target in the set up of warehouse automation. This means that you will need to accurately determine the best match of material movement devices to get an optimized end result of your manufacturing. One of the major costs that is included in the price of your product to the customer is the cost of material handling and transportation. The lower you keep these costs, the lower will be your customer pricing for your products.
Using warehouse automation will reduce errors that can occur in picking parts for use in production. You already know that any tasks that a human has to do manually has a chance of being done incorrectly. As with other types of automation, automated devices that take over the tasks of humans can perform those tasks much more efficiently. In fact it should be a rare instance when the task is not done correctly by automation. Usually when automation does not perform the task correctly, the error can be traced back to a mistake that some human made in preparing the automation to do its work in production. In the long-term humans are far better as supervisors of automated devices that perform repetitive tasks that are part of the manufacturing process.
When you are planning for automating your warehouse, you should review the type of distribution that your company needs, both in-house and to customers. If you have a large network of outlets to support and a large number of products to distribute, you will need to optimize the system for this scenario. Conversely, if you have a small group of outlets to which you need to distribute products, you will optimize your warehouse in another way. It is important that you retain an automation provider that has significant experience in the layout and implementation of different types of warehouse systems. They will be able to direct you to the right warehouse design to optimize both your raw material distribution that you use in y9our plant and the distribution for shipping of finished goods to customers. The solution provider will look at your current warehouse design and give your recommendations about how the configuration may need to change to get the optimum flow of raw materials and finished products. There may be a case that you will be able to use existing warehouse layout, but do not be surprised if the recommended configuration of your warehouse changes dramatically. It is a rare situation when any two warehouse configurations are the same. Most companies will have some special variations that they need to include in their warehouse operation based on the way they do business. These adjustments in configuration are a typical tasks for solution providers, be sure they will be able to include them in your design. Once the implementation is up and running you will realize significant benefits in cost reduction and improved production.
Related Topics
Material Handling Automation – There are as many variations of material handling as there are products and raw materials to handle. You should review your material handling needs in the light of how large your distribution network is. An effective solution provider can help you do this successfully.
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