More ways to win with warehouse automation

-- Modern Materials Handling, 1/1/2003

Even with the many expert viewpoints quoted in the main article, we’ve still only scratched the surface of best practices warehouse automation. Here are other key observations.

Refresh your perspective

Throwing away misconceptions about yesterday’s automated technologies and any perceived limits to their current capabilities is important to achieving best practice automation.

 Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) are “much faster, cheaper, and more functional now than ten years ago,” maintains Stephen Parsley, principal logistics engineer, SK Daifuku (800-253-1003) These systems are more modular and simpler now, he adds. Installation times that once were 14 to 16 months are now only five to eight months.

“The customer is looking for any edge over competitors,” argues Parsley. “A good idea may be worth only six months,” he says, in the lead time it gives a company over its competition. But often that’s enough.

Similarly, today’s automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) – with guidance choices such as laser or inertial systems – are far more flexible than their wire-guided predecessors, says Earl Raynal, sales manager, Control Engineering, a subsidiary of Jervis B. Webb (231-347-3931). New inertial guidance and communications technology, for example, now allow for the remote coupling or decoupling of a tugger AGV from its trailer load. In large systems, such as the system for one of his clients with five miles of AGV guidepath, use of this technology permits cutting the total number of AGVs required in half, from 20 vehicles to ten AGVs, he explains, saving greatly on the user’s total investment.

Forge better links with supply chain partners

 Use of best practice automation may also be forced upon a DC or warehouse by conditions at its supply chain partners. Many customers require bar code labels on shipments. And even warehouses shipping limited numbers of stock keeping units (SKUs) may be forced to invest in automatic data capture (ADC) systems and electronic data interchange (EDI) or Internet response capability if they sell to big volume customers. Retailers like Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and many others now require advance shipping notices (ASNs) sent electronically from suppliers.

Even so, conventional ASN capability with bar codes and EDI or Web messaging still isn’t good enough in some situations. Warehouses supplying raw materials just-in-time to a manufacturer, such as an auto maker, may require something else, as Scott Cobb, vice president, product marketing, supply chain solutions, Symbol Technology (800-722-6234) explains.

“We’re talking just hours from when parts leave the auto supplier’s warehouse until they’re used in production,” says Cobb. In such cases, the manufacturer asks that all the data in an ASN be packed into a 2-D “bar” code symbology, which holds more data than the more common, “picket fence” bar code. The 2-D code then travels with the shipped material and is scanned upon receipt. “That’s when many of the customers actually buy the supplied material,” says Cobb, “when it’s scanned.”

This best practice “is very prevalent now in the auto industry,” Cobb adds.  “We’re also seeing it more and more in consumer goods and electronics where the supplier warehouse holds vendor-managed or vendor-owned inventory.”

Supply chain conditions can impact the automation decision in other ways too, says Juergen Baumbach, director, logistics design and engineering, Swisslog North America (800-764-0300).  A retail DC, for example, invests in slightly more automated handling so the retailer saves on labor when unloading trucks at its retail outlets, he points out. At the DC use of automation sequences products to be shipped by family groups, he explains. Instead of shipping a mixed pallet load of electrical items and garden hoses going to a Home Depot, for example, the DC first builds only sequenced loads of all electrical products on pallets. Then it builds pallets with all garden hoses. Putaway at stores is far easier then.

Fit automation to business strategy

Fitting best practice automation to a company’s business strategy sounds straightforward enough. But the “right” fit can be the result of any number of factors – and sometimes factors one wouldn’t suspect at first -- suggests Larry Bandstra, vice president, Sedlak Management Consultants (330-908-2100).

An automation decision may result not just from an acceptable return on investment (ROI). One Sedlak client automated packing so that the DC “looked more high tech” and thus boosted the client’s perceived value for an IPO (initial public offering). Another client wanted to be “first” with certain automation “because it wanted to appeal to its highly technical market place,” says Bandstra.