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With floor areas measured in hectares, carrying tens of thousands of SKUs to supply the daily needs of 67 million people, the distribution centres of our major food retailers are surely the textbook case for extensive and profitable automation. Dependence on manual operations is looking increasingly unsustainable.
As global supply chains continue to be disrupted, businesses have opted to increase inventory through forward distribution to accommodate e-commerce demand. For example, warehouses can take advantage of the Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (ASRS) to recover up to 85% of existing floor space when compared to standard shelving.
Batchsizes of individual products, a particularly wide product range, short order processing times and omnichannel distribution – these are the challenges many companies in industry and trade must face. A conveying system, for example, connects the storage with goods-to-person work stations.
Goods inspection is an example. Production of customised product packaging may be done by the product manufacturer, but possibly at a distribution centre too. Thus, the purchasing team may try to reduce unit prices, without thinking about batchsizes or delivery frequency, causing inventory levels to rise.
In our picking example, you would begin by analyzing the entire warehouse to identify where the bottleneck or constraint occurs. They address these by maximizing up-time, by examining and optimizing batchsizes, and by moving quality control stations’ position in the workflow to before the constraints.
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