Supply chain disruptions, increasing demand and the nationwide labor shortage have led more companies to consider and implement automation. That being said, automated warehouse systems have become more important and crucial for companies to stay competitive now than ever. We wanted to talk to one of our experts, Head of Sales for the U.S. and Canada, Danilo Potocnik, about things companies should consider before implementing an AS/RS system. Danilo has been with Stoecklin for 14 years. Having been part of various different projects we are grateful he wanted to share his insights about the implementation of an AS/RS system. For the purpose of this blogpost, we decided to focus on two major focus areas: Product data integrity and pallet and case integrity.
Product Data Integrity
Manufacturers are changing packaging and product configurations all the time. Sometimes these changes get made ‘at corporate’ or ‘in the system’, sometimes these changes slip through the cracks. In a conventional warehouse, it does not matter so much if there happens to be a couple more or a couple fewer pounds on a pallet than before because of these changes. Similarly, an order selector can quickly figure out that if a store is ordering 24 items, then it really does not matter if he or she picks 4 six packs instead or 6 four packs. A conventional environment can be quite forgiving when it comes to issues with regards to data integrity. That won’t be the case with an automated system. Data integrity will be something that needs to be looked after with greater attention, if is not already, because it will matter. Automated systems regularly use weight checks to help verify products and quantity counts on a pallet. If product weights are not accurate, then the automation will flag errors that are not really errors. Along those same lines, when a robot goes to grab a box, it does not really know or check that there are 4 or 6 inner packs in the box. A robot won’t do readjustment math on the fly. If the robot is told to pick 4 boxes, then it will pick 4 boxes and if that box was changed from having 6 inner packs to 4 inner backs, then someone will be getting a short shipment. Product data integrity matters a lot in automated systems.
Pallet and case integrity
Automation and robots have many functions and capabilities, but among the many things that they are lacking, relative to humans is vision. For the most part automation is nearly blind. In order to compensate, systems are designed in such a matter that they are ‘told’ where everything will be in advance. Similarly, they are ‘told’ where things will NOT be in advance, too. As automation is interacting with a pallet, for example, it expects the pallet to be a certain dimension with pallet boards in certain locations. Openings in the pallet are expected to be in certain places and have certain dimensions, as well. All in all, this means that pallet integrity will be more important in an automated system moving forward.
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