Automation Today Issue 71 | Application Profile

Optimize Your Warehouse to Stay Ahead of Supply Chain Disruptions

Traditional warehouse infrastructure is not designed to support the rapidly changing demands of consumers. These challenges can be addressed by implementing agile solutions to optimize your warehouse.

In the traditional warehouse, existing infrastructure is unequipped to support the rapidly changing environment and evolving customer demands. The pandemic has spurred the rapid rise of e-commerce compounded with customers expecting faster delivery times, more choices, and greater flexibility in aspects including product returns.

According to the Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies (PMMI), four out of five companies have more than 100 product stock keeping units (SKUs) and over half predict SKUs will continue to increase at a rate of 10% to 50%. The proliferation of SKUs alongside more personalized orders have led to bottlenecks in sortation and inefficiencies in gapping and singulation applications.

As warehouse volumes increases, conventional systems allow limited opportunity for reconfiguration and expandability to respond to new supply chain demands and disruptions. Any modifications will also lead to added costs, operational risks as well as productivity losses.

In a highly competitive market, investing in an optimized warehouse with agile, end-to-end solutions can help to respond faster to changing supply chain requirements for organizations and machine builders and evolve to meet future needs.

Benefits of an optimized automated warehouse:

Shift to high-speed sortation that will enable faster speeds
Native track and trace of parcels within the system design will offer new levels of system efficiency
A modular nature that allows for easy modification with minimized costs
Improved routing and system throughput without extra programming or configuration
Simulation software enables test scenarios and optimized workflows before costly equipment is installed and commissioned
Emulation of software enables virtualized testing of mechatronics and automation to reduce errors and commissioning time

End-to-end warehouse management solutions

Main Image — Figure 1 shows what a typical end-to-end warehouse management process looks like. By injecting new warehouse innovations, organizations can virtualize development, optimize design, and achieve flexibility without sacrificing productivity.

1. Inbound

Once the materials are received in the warehouse, this is where they are unloaded and placed onto conveyors. Fast speed controllers can aid to drive increased performance, capacity, productivity, and security to help meet growing demands. Additionally, remote I/O devices such as the ArmorBlock® I/O modules provide low-cost, hardened, I/O suitable for on-machine use.

2. Sorting

This area is where items are moved across warehouse facility lines, for example, the movement of ordered products from storage to picking areas and completed orders to the loading area for distribution.

The use of robots can help to overcome top operational challenges, from staying productive amid a workforce skills shortage to improving dynamic package handling capabilities and handling a wider range of products. By integrating them into the architecture and with other equipment, operations can become responsive to demands.

3. Stocking

This is where items are labeled and stocked onto racks. By investing in intelligent conveyor systems such as independent cart technology that uses magnets for precise control motion, it can bring increased line speed and flexibility. Solutions such as the MagneMover LITE offers different layout options as it is made of a selection of standard building blocks, each of which is a motorized track section. The system manages the speed and direction of each carrier individual and keeps track of its location.

4. Picking and Packing

Picking is the process of finding and extracting products from a warehouse to fulfill customer orders. Subsequently, the packing procedure typically involves choosing the appropriate materials and containers to pack products, weighing the package, and labeling it with the relevant invoice or packing slip. In this section, the use of smart machines and devices can go a long way to boosting uptime while improving safety. For instance, smart motor control solutions can help to prevent motor failures with an integrated, data-driven approach and on-machine safety.

5. Outbound

This refers to the shipping out of finished goods to customers from the warehouse or distribution center. It consists of the order fulfillment process that includes picking, packing, shipping, and delivery of a package with a particular focus on goods issue processing and shipping orders. The abovementioned automated solutions should be considered here too since there are similar actions in place.

6. Command center

Lastly is the command center, which enables warehouses to function as designed, to perform day-to-day operations, helping businesses to assess what are the optimum resources required to maximize productivity during operations. This is where synchronization between the manufacturing equipment systems and warehouse management system is essential to optimize both data and material flows between logistics and production.

Our FactoryTalk® Warehouse can control all warehouse activities required to support production operations, including inbound processing, storage and operation, and outbound processing. Furthermore, it provides the required tools to easily modify or build workflows, as needed.

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