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How do you decide when a warehouse actually needs automation?

anjalisharmaa625

Our warehouse operations are growing rapidly and management is pushing for automation. However, we are still trying to determine whether automation is actually necessary or if process optimization could solve most of our problems.

For those who have implemented warehouse automation, what were the key indicators that made you move forward with it? Was it order volume, labor shortage, picking errors, or something else?

  • 0

    Hello,

    I work in warehouse automation. Looking at your profile, I’m surprised I haven’t heard of your company. Usually it always comes down to ROI. Companies start out small, filling orders from their garage using labor from family and friends. As they grow, they’ll move up to 3rd party logicstics, or potentially building/buying/leasing a warehouse of their own. Each step in the process opens different opportunities to automate or become more efficient. A company wouldn’t move from garage fulfillment directly into robotic depalletizing because they wouldn’t have the volume to justify it.

    The type of automation also depends on the resources currently available inside the plant and if thought & planning has gone into the warehouse design. Best case scenario for large-scale automation is a large customer building a brand new warehouse greenfield and they’re planning automation from the start. Then there is room to plan AMR paths, large ASRS blocks, conveyance, etc. 

    If we walk into a smaller startup with a 30,000 sq ft warehouse it is hard to talk AMRs and easier to talk about simple steps like pallet wrappers and case sealers.

  • 0 in reply to aspork42

    To expand a little - “Automation” also means different things to different people. I would hardly consider a stand-alone case sealer to be automation, but in some warehouses, it absolutely is.

    And for the ROI calculation - as they say “it has to make dollars to make sense”. When the volumes are high enough, then the ROI calculation changes. Packing out 200 items a day is very different than packing out 50,000. So what automation options make sense in each scenario are different.