When implementing automated warehouses, one of the challenges is to prevent operational disruptions, ensuring process fluidity and an operation standardization with several warehouses technologies, automated or not. Keep reading to see which strategies mitigate this important risk factor.
A company that implements one or more automated warehouses, typically has conventional warehouse operations, so automated warehouse will complement existing operations rather than replacing them, raising some challenges.
Automated warehouses are specific, so they must have specific controls, correct? Wrong!
Operational process standardization between warehouses is very important to ensure operational continuity. Basically, the operation should be the same in any warehouse, automated or non-automated, avoiding that there are undesirable specializations and operators working only with automated warehouses or non-automated warehouses.
Thus, ideally all warehouses use the same system to support operation, promoting the following advantages:
- Facilitate operational management;
- Centralizes operational and managerial information;
- Standardize business rules and processes, in order to reduce development and maintenance effort;
- Eliminate special treatments and features.
And how do we deal with the coexistence of automated and conventional environments?
Regardless of the business type, Industrial Production, Distribution or E-Commerce, it will be necessary to collect and form kits with materials from automated and non-automated warehouses. Thus, using a single operation support system will also allow the use of two techniques to deal with the coexistence of these environments, namely: Grouping and Prioritization.
Grouping intends that materials with the same end point (ex. the same end address on two separate online purchases from an E-Commerce site, or the same Kanban station from a production line in an industry) are grouped with a unique identifier (different from the request), so the material can be easily grouped after the picking to be shipped together, optimizing transportation logistics.
Prioritization intends to optimize the sequence in which the material is picked in the stock (automated or non-automated) regarding grouping (facilitating kit formation) and transportation loading. So, prioritization allows the harmonious synchronization of material coming from the automated and non-automated warehouses.
It’s easy to understand that the use of the techniques explained above can, in operations with large material volumes, avoid operation chaos, as well as reduce the space required for shipping preparation and reduce vehicle loading time.
Should the automated warehouse have its own inventory control? No!
Inventory control must be centralized for all warehouses types, automated or non-automated.
Some automated warehouse systems needs inventory control to run, and so they have a parallel inventory control. However, it’s critical to have a very stringent synchronization control of inventory inputs and outputs, with the company primary inventory (WMS/ERP).
Companies that wish to implement automated warehouses should give preference to warehouses that “only” works with stock positions, it means, they collect boxes, trays or pallets rather than the material itself.
The existence of multiple inventory controls ends up creating problems due to differences between "balances" of these controls, requiring creation of reconciliation processes to adjust these differences.
We understand that multiple inventory controls unnecessarily increases complexity, as well as increases number of operational problems.
What about the automated warehouse system activation? Incremental vs Full Volume?
It’s advisable to perform a ramp up to validate processes incrementally, minimizing impacts and ensuring operational change, allowing a gradual performance monitoring and more controlled treatment of the gaps identified after implementation.
The full volume activation should only happen when there is no other viable option, because the operation risk is too high and can have serious impacts in the operation.
It’s extremely important to plan landscape support and maintenance to ensure the automated warehouse system remains fully operational. You can find more details here on support for real-time operations.
In this article we discussed some points that help prevent operational disruptions, but we know that this is a very critical and complex subject for any automated storage system implementation. At Processware we have extensive experience in the implementation of global operational systems, which guarantee the application of these strategies and allow us to reach all the potential in the inclusion of these technologies in a highly complex logistics environment. Learn more about our solutions here.
