An automated warehouse system is a storage solution that automates inventory movement into, within, and out of warehouses to end customers with minimal human assistance. It uses software and technology like sensors and robotics to fully automate tasks. This storage equipment works simultaneously with existing tools, such as inventory management.
The warehouse automated storage system is a type of goods-to-person (GTP) technology that includes equipment like carrying vehicles, shuttles, and mini-loaders to store and retrieve products or materials.
In this article, we will discuss the benefits of automated warehouse systems that will help you decide whether they are suitable for you. These systems offer multiple possibilities to help you to solve business challenges with excellent competitive advantage.
Warehouse automated storage and picking solutions help group orders that fall under a common category or item with fewer workers. It also helps you to reduce the cost of picking, including the cost of floor space. This storage solution will help you expand floor space with proper inventory management and properly utilise the overhead or vertical space. These systems work on bringing goods to an operator through robotisation, reducing the time spent looking for them from one point to another.
Additionally, this process can help reduce costs associated with a low workforce and workplace hazards.
Boosts Employee Productivity
Businesses can streamline processes in supply chain management with the help of warehouse automation, making them more efficient. This doesn’t usually entail replacing employees with robots but assisting staff in doing their duties more quickly and effectively and/or reallocating their time to concentrate on more specialised tasks.
Effective warehouse-automated storage systems can increase worker satisfaction by removing the more tedious and repetitive tasks. This system also helps you optimise distribution centers, improve processes, and boost productivity.
Supply chain management usually faces challenges from unpredictable markets, impatient customers, and unstable procurement. This makes managing supply, demand, and manually balancing highly difficult, leaving a huge scope for making costly mistakes.
In such scenarios, automated systems based on artificial intelligence and machine learning can help improve inventory management. They can also help with aggregating market data, customer requirements, real-time inventory levels, restocking, and production lead times. Depending on your business’s demands, the level of automation might range from simple optimisation suggestions to fully autonomous management. Digitalisation and artificial intelligence in automated storage systems allow you to maintain the optimal inventory with the least amount of manual labour.
Apart from that, you will see improved efficiency, a list of the right products at the right time, minimising errors, and providing better experiences for people involved, especially customers.
An important reason why customers lose trust in an e-commerce business is when they receive the wrong order. This automated storage system can help you eliminate errors by reducing the number of decisions a warehouse associate needs to make. You can also use it to improve order accuracy through box selection, picking, and packing. This system enables you to pick the right packaging for each order based on the seller’s preferences and instructions.
Warehouse automation in the picking process not only relieves your staff from performing monotonous and tedious work but also helps them to concentrate on added-value operations, which makes work more satisfying. This system minimises employee turnover and recruitment costs as well as provides you with an opportunity to capitalise on training and experiences.
The inbound operations in a warehouse mostly comprise unloading the materials and appropriately assigning putaway tasks to them. There are different risks that warehouse workers face due to slips, trips, and falls, misjudged ergonomic-related discomfort while lifting, tugging, or pushing, and material handling accidents caused by box drops.
Moreover, through the implication of warehouse automated storage systems, businesses would be helpful in increasing the safety of the employees or workers working in a warehouse. Furthermore, it can be said that there are multiple advantages to having an automated warehouse system for your inventory management. Some of these have been highlighted above.
