SupplyChainTalk: The case for warehouse automation

On 23 November, SupplyChainTalk host Alastair Charatan was joined by Rueben Scriven, senior analyst, Interact Analysis; Clare Bottle, chief executive, U.K. Warehousing Association; Simon Jones, U.K. sales executive, Exotec; and Joe Daft, head of robotics, Wise Robotics—OrderWise.

Note: This article was created by Business Reporter.

The U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak touched on four points that the U.K. Warehousing Association also has at the top of its agenda: sharing best practices and fiscal and regulatory arrangements that the government should implement to enhance the growth of the warehousing industry. Traditionally, warehousing vendors were located in Japan, Germany, or the U.S. But now, it’s become important for countries, such as the U.K., to develop their home-grown solutions. It also makes sense to have a home-grown integrator industry. However, it takes a lot of time for a new company to establish itself on the market. It seems that it matters less where the robots come from if the U.K. has local software and hardware engineers to integrate them into existing systems. The way forward seems to be open ecosystems, where new pieces of automation software can be onboarded at pace. The democratization of robotics Robotics has the potential to address the skills shortages that the industry is suffering from with lower resource and workforce requirements. On the market for warehouse automation for different countries, the U.K. has the highest automation spend per warehouse. The next stage of warehouse automation is going to be in the area of manipulating different items. Storage density has become key to keeping rising warehousing costs at bay. At the conference, both the prime minister and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer argued for moving away from the low-pay model to making human workers more productive with the help of robotics while also improving their employee experience. Twenty years ago, it was only big players with their own warehouses who invested in automation. Now, robots are much more accessible, and it’s rather common to lease out one or two to try them on a robotics-as-a-service basis. Technology providers concentrate on developing picking and replenishment of Pickface, as these are the areas with the highest labor cost. Inventory management is also being automated with the help of drones and other robotic systems to check what inventory is missing. However, a lot of organizations are still not ready for automation either from a software foundation or inventory control perspective, or they need to deploy some automation before they can start with robotics. Third-party logistics (3LPs) used to be short-term contracts, which made achieving an impressive return on investment (ROI)difficult. Meanwhile, the robotics market at present is rather underpenetrated but is expected to grow rapidly as mobile robots enable 3PLs to automate at scale too. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) now can expect a quick ROI in robotics. For larger companies, a more strategic investment can make a bigger difference in the long run, such as the reduction of labor costs by 80%. For them, quick payoffs should be less of a priority. Robotic systems are now very flexible, and there is a lot of redundancy designed into them, so downtime is possible put fairly unlikely. With automated mobile robots, issues can be isolated and the whole facility doesn’t have to shut down if there is a glitch. The panel’s advice

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The danger for SMEs is that their equipment (robots, forklifts, software, etc.) comes from different providers, which they may not have the bandwidth to manage on their own. Lights-out warehouses were a popular idea about five years ago, but no one talks about them anymore. A fully automated warehouse is still very much a thing of the future. Get prepared first for automation and automate first what you’ve got before making the final leap of physical automation. Training staff to be able to deal with robots must be factored into the ROI. Don’t underestimate the digital literacy of your warehouse labor force. Your warehouse is part of the wider network of your supply chain. So, understand, where your bottlenecks are and how automation fits into the wider system, and don’t forget about service networks either!

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Watch it on demand here.