Automating Your Warehouse? Here are the Best Practices You Should Consider Implementing

If you are looking at little automation in your warehouse this is the best practice to lookout. If you are automating your warehouse in terms of conveyors or sorters or even robots it would make a lot of sense to mark your SKUs as conveyable or not conveyable, sortable or non-sortable and as the robots coming everywhere robotable or non-robotable. The last thing you want to do is make a small product or a big product ride the conveyor. Technically all conveyors have certain requirements mentioned, such as the box size of certain length, width, and height. The carton’s matching these requirements can only convey through the conveyor. The same requirements for sorting the products using sorter. It could be whatever type of sorter that you might have big sorter or small sorter and even robots. The only difference between robots and conveyors is the businesses. Before it used to change every five to seven years and now the changes happening even faster. Imagine either your volume picked up or you’re handling much bigger volume because your business has picked up or your business is changing. Before it used to be all retail now it’s all ecomm, before you used to handle all cases, but now you are handling units, which means your business have changed. That means you have to change your process and your layout has to change.

If you had these roller conveyors, imagine ripping that off and then redoing the layout completely. That’s a lot of work and it’s very expensive to take it off and then put it to construct in a new manner. You may not be able to reuse the same thing, you may have to buy brand new conveyor equipment. So all those things are the drawbacks with the old-school mounts fixed on the floor mounted, on the wall mounted, on the roof. Things have changed now and the robots are configurable, which means you can quickly configure, program, and change the way the robot works. I mean before it was going to let’s say from here to here and now when we need to change it, you can easily change it anyway. It could be a guided vehicle which goes around by scanning the barcodes on the floor or it’s doing something else completely automated like an automatic car or something like. A lidar based sensor reads the data and then it detects on obstacles and then finds the way and then keeps going. Robots are very easy to reconfigure and reprogram. They can be made to go in a completely different direction or to make it do something else. That’s the appeal of robots and also the cost of all these sensors and the electronics have come down significantly which makes the robots and affordable option in a DC environment.

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