10+ Benefits Of Warehouse Automation System In India
In the current time if you own or manage warehouse weather for selling products on Amazon or for your own e-Commerce website a good quality warehouse automation system can help you increase efficiency and take a more data-driven approach for decision making in your business. As the environment of e-Commerce is changing and the demand of the market is increasing as well as the competition, Implementing warehouse automation is soon going to be a norm.
In order to survive the wave of competition coming logistics and retail companies around the world depending on their size are implementing warehouse automation systems in India. The question here is why? we will talk about that soon. We will talk about the benefits of warehouse automation and also how can you utilize them according to your business needs but first let’s try to understand what makes a warehouse automatic?
What is a warehouse automation system(WAS)?
An automatic warehouse system consists of software that connects a number of hardware components that itself is embedded into the warehouse it consists of many things from robotic arms, location telling chips(RFID Chip), cameras, error detection systems, robots for taking goods from one place another. All of these work together to make it convenient for warehouse managers to find what is lacking in their pipeline and make it easier to find a unique perspective to find the solution and dominate the competition.
It is almost like having a second pair of eyes and limbs that helps better control things and make the whole system smoother and smoother from the beginning to the end. Depending on the size of the warehouse and cost systems and be added or removed that can help plan or automate daily routines of delivery and stocks.
How does it work?
The warehouse automation system is focused on managing items in a selected area. It connects people and machines telling their location and condition making it easier to fulfill deliveries efficiently and at the correct time. These are truly smart systems that rely on real-time data to automatically adjust operations planning and execution depending on priorities, workload, resources, and capacity.
What are the different parts of the warehouse automation system?
An advanced warehouse automation system mainly consists of two parts. The first one is for actually physically doing something like simulating human work, and the second part AI is for managing the physical part working as the brain of the system making it capable of decision making.
Robotic Arm, Drones, Carts, and Other physical parts
These are things or physical parts or robots for doing repetitive, heavy, and dangerous works by replicating the human effort. They are capable of doing things like picking things from one place to another sorting surveying and doing delivery with the help of drones. Quite naturally depending on their role, they have different levels of autonomy.
For example, a delivery drone will be far more superior in terms of autonomy than a robot for simply putting things from one place to another. The drone will have smart GPS solutions for navigating its way through unknown places. Similarly, a robot for putting things will be less smart than the autonomous vehicles that take one thing from one place to another in the premise of the warehouse though it will still be less smart than the delivery drone.
The AI
Here all the technical stuff starts to take place. Without this, all the robots would have been a pile of metal. It is the AI, it powers the robot for critical decision making. AI, more specifically Computer Vision lets the system access the sensors and actuators to locate themselves and their surroundings to navigate. Ai also helps to store and analyze data for better decisions making day by day. With the help of Deep Learning, it can also decide what action will be most preferable for which kind of situation. It can also learn to recognize the voice and work as a total voice-activated system.
Top 10 Benefits of Warehouse Automation in India
More Efficiency at Minimal Cost
If you put yourself into the shoes of a person in the warehouse for managing stuff. You will realize how hard it is to nail all the operations each time efficiently. When the warehouse automation system can measure growing customer demand and predict at what time it can go out of stock also order for restocking. Making the warehouse capable of providing seamless service to its customers. Nowadays when 88 percent of people choose a same-day delivery option, automation helps you ensure the same-day delivery is indeed same-day delivery and the stocks are not running out.
It is one of the many reasons why warehouses around the world today depending on their size are implementing some kind of automation into their supply line.
Managing Employees Effectively
If you were thinking of this as a threat for making people lose their jobs or being ethical or not, you should not have to. You see, It might even sound backward but the machine itself didn’t bring humanity this far. We need the cooperation of both. All the warehouse automation tools work together to help the employees.
Instead of taking over people’s jobs, it helps cut down on on-site commute time and do all the mundane work. It allows them to better manage and employ human skills in warehouse operations making them more efficient in themselves to let them do more creative or logical works that machines can’t handle.
Safety All-Around
Employee safety should be one of your most concerns. As well as for products themselves. Depending of automation provides both. Lifting heavy things from one place to another is a norm in warehouses which can be dangerous if not done properly. Sometimes in the festive times when the load of work increases the risk factor rises even more. If you also work with storing and supplying chemicals, which often can be toxic if manhandled. All of the issues can be simply resolved by using warehouse automation. Here the machines will do all of the work without putting employees in danger.
Minimize Error
The burden of tasks can often overwhelmed people. So much so that mistakes can take place. It can cause difficulty managing and calculating the funds at year end. Another biggest advantage of warehouse automation system is optimum error free execution. There are many different applications for automating warehouses that includes mobile apps and fleets of drones equipped with barcode scanners calculating everything precisely making an airtight management system with little to no errors.
Low Cost Operations
Yes you read right. Though depending on size warehouse automation system is expensive sometimes but soon they pay for themselves. It provides higher efficiency hence minimum wastage and loses, reduce labour cost, higher performance, etc. This advantage of warehouse automation makes it one of the most efficient cost effective solution of the whole warehouse. As it saves a lot of money that can be used to scale the business, that makes it a mean of low cost operations.
Easily Scalable Model
Another advantage of warehouse management is its fast scaling nature. You can scale in up or down according to your market needs. Previously people have been hiring more temporary employees in the festive seasons, big brands were the one to do that more frequently than others. Now, They no longer need to go through all that hiring process every year instead they can set their warehouse automation system to coup with higher traffic rates and, while employees are focusing more on customer-centric activities such as customer service, holiday packaging, etc. Again in normal time they can be programmed to work just as they were in normal times.
More Reliable For Diffrent Circumstances
If you remember properly in the beginning of pandemic when everything was under lockdown, most of the warehouses whop were depending on mostly on human labours got closed and faced millions of dollars of loses. On the other hand the automated warehouses even though faced some issues but got back on its feet easily. As they can also work with minimal human interaction, changes in circumstances can put little to no effect on them.
Having minimal humans also mean better sanitization, easily maintaining physical distancing and no restrictions from authorities. It gave proven edge over businesses with human only warehouses. It is another great reason to choose warehouse automation system.
Save The Environment
Sustainability is another issue that we face in almost every industry. As humans what we must look out for, as we don’t have another earth to spare. Warehouse Automation system provides more remote work options reduce carbon foot print and helps promote sustainability. Through the help of things like Predictive analytics and condition monitoring it can help better and calculated use of warehouse resources and promote recycling. It also saves money from this end too.
Ease Of Maintenance
Taking the help of automation and IoT in warehouse lets you monitor the condition of the goods we have already said that but it can also monitor health of automation devices itself. It enables predective maintenance and no surprise breakdowns. It lets you use the machines properly and prevent longer down time.
Keep The Doors Open For Future
We are just in the beginning of digital age we still don’t know whats going to come next. Who knows new gates the future will open for businesses warehouse automation might be the first steeping stone towards something bigger. With the help of robots, automatic cars and drones we might keep ourselves ready for something more in the future. It is one of the bigest benefits of warehouse automation, as here you will be able to reap that benefit pretty quickly and the stage of jump in technology will be smaller.
Calculated Decissions (Easily)
As we said before, it is one of the biggest benefits of warehouse automation is effectively using the power of data. In modern time data is no longer a power its the superpower. The warehouse automation system collets data to improvise itself. The autonomous vehicles, drones and robots all are reading and learning depending on deep learning and AI. The analytics system here comes into action and tells the warehouse managers what will be the best decisions according to current circumstances. From here they can take more calculated decisions making the process more efficient and offer smoother work flow.
Customer Satisfaction
Every businesses main focus should be its customers. It is same here too. As all the inner process here is going on efficiently its evident that all the process out side will be smoother than before. Customers will get their delivaries in time and probably way before expected time. This breeze like buying experience will make your customers choose you over your competitors.
Conclusion
Automation is the way the world is moving now. Every businesses are implementing the tools as fast as they can. If you are a warehouse manager or owner warehouse automation system should be one of your priorities in 2022 and beyond. If you like the idea of having autonomous machines taking all the headaches out from yourself and thinking about having your own please free to check here we will help you with all your queries for free. Hope you had a good time reading this, have a great day.