Interest in warehouse automation is increasing as is the number of vendors in the market.
Most warehouse operators are considering automation to ensure their customers are serviced at an optimal cost and to ensure continuity of service.
Most will remember not that long ago it was difficult to find people to employ so security of service came high on the investment rationale for automation.
It remains year on year more expensive to employ people which continues to offer an incentive to reduce the reliance on manual labour and automate where practicable.
In order to select the best automated solution and secure a return on the investment it’s essential the business case is founded on good quality data.
Deploying Vitesse ahead of an automation project provides a number of benefits and helps to make the business case much more robust.
Vitesse will record, in granular detail, the activities being undertaken in the warehouse and the cost of carrying out those tasks – the cost to serve each sales channel can be established. This information could be shared with an automation vendor so they can show, as part of their pitch, where these costs will fall out thereby funding their solution.
Vitesse captures the distance covered to pick orders – a vital piece of information because this unproductive time is there to be saved by automation therefore degrees of certainty can be introduced to the savings calculations. It is quite normal for us to find in excess of 50% of the cost of picking an order to be travel – people walking.
A business case for automation using ‘units per hour’ data to underpin the investment is going to be heavy on assumptions.
Post implementation, particularly with robotics, Vitesse has a role to play providing ‘before and after’ analysis – is the automation delivering to plan?