Evolving into Connected Warehouses: The First Step Toward Long-Term Success

In the past year, online buying has skyrocketed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, vastly accelerating e-commerce and condensing a growth dynamic that would have otherwise taken a decade into a matter of months.
 
As a result, warehouses are operating at some of the highest capacity levels we’ve ever seen. The need for additional space and productivity is so great that some companies, such as Amazon, have even turned to abandoned malls and golf courses to develop new warehouse facilities.
 
This surge of e-commerce growth, coupled with the critical demand for warehousing space of any kind, has placed new demands on logistics and warehouse operations — namely, a substantial increase in workers, space and transportation efficiency. Since most operations cannot scale resources proportionally with demand increases, this has exacerbated an ongoing need for innovative solutions that can increase worker productivity, asset usage and space utilization.
 
To do more with less, many operators are looking at all new technologies to help, including the drive towards automation. Becoming a fully automated warehouse has become the ultimate goal for many logistics and warehouse operators. While this remains an ambitious end goal, the reality is that automated technologies are not “there” yet, and costs are far beyond most operators’ capital budgets. In fact, even Amazon has stated that it would take at least 10 years before the tech giant could entirely automate its fulfillment processes. Our takeaway is that if a company like Amazon, with effectively unlimited resources, doesn’t see full automation in the near term, the rest of the industry will need even more time for technologies to mature and costs to become manageable.
 
The past year has exposed the inability of current approaches to handle higher outputs without significant workforce and facility investments. So how can logistics and warehouse operators make changes to increase operations and productivity in the near term?
 
Smarter warehouses start with connectivity
As operators look for both near and long-term ways to enhance productivity, they must start by setting the groundwork for those operations with connectivity. Currently, the vast majority of warehouses have limited to no connectivity infrastructure and those that do tend to have the bare minimum to perform required operations. The good news is there are many different wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, 5G and various Internet of Things protocols, that operators can leverage to deploy devices that fit each of their specific needs. 
 
While some high-end facilities have advanced connectivity infrastructures, they are the exception rather than the rule. Existing facilities will need to evolve to a fully connected warehouse to support the new wave of technology needed to boost productivity within their existing footprints. Operators will first need to build the infrastructure that any new technology will depend on.
 
It’s all about the data 
As the transition from a fully worker-driven facility to a highly automated facility takes place, a critical success factor will be the ability of humans and automated material handling equipment (MHE) to efficiently work within the same facility. Strictly relying on spatially unaware systems, such as warehouse management systems (WMS), won’t solve this problem. Rather, the solution lies in providing automated devices, humans and WMS with the necessary spatial context of the entire facility and its contents to correctly identify the optimal resource required to perform each task efficiently.
 
With the increase in automated MHE deployments, such as AS/RS systems, cobots and AGVs, the key test of their usefulness will be how adaptable they can be within their environments. While most of these technologies can navigate locally with the help of lidar, vision systems and/or sensors, they typically lack the facility-level spatial awareness needed to co-exist with human workers, ever-changing inventory location, and other legacy materials handling systems. This added level of detail will be critical for optimal productivity, efficiency and safety.
 
The same goes for WMS. Most of these systems have no idea where an inventory item is in relation to the worker picking an order, let alone any autonomous vehicles. Combining WMS data with spatial data for the facility will increase operational visibility to enable slott­ing enhancements and optimized workforce and asset allocation. 
 
To achieve spatial awareness and its benefits, operators can easily integrate their different data silos into warehouse spatial intelligence (WSI) solutions. WSI is a new category of software solutions that have emerged to address urgent market needs amid the pandemic, pulling data into a common interface and analyzing the multiple data sources to provide clear visibility and productivity metrics. Because WSI solutions sit on top of existing data silos, there is considerably less risk and cost versus upgrading an entire WMS or hiring dedicated personnel to continuously optimize robots. 
 
WSI solutions integrate the real-time location of workers, status of docks, legacy materials handling and new automated material handling equipment with facility layouts and inventory location for seamless interoperability. Beyond improving productivity and efficiency of day-to-day operations, WSI solutions can improve safety by providing detailed congestion analyses to improve routing and movement within the warehouse, helping to preclude collisions and improve overall safety. WSI can also be integrated with forklifts to assess and improve driver behavior and set up alerts to identify common points of unsafe interactions between forklifts and workers.
 
This is all made possible by starting with a foundation of connectivity and spatial context that supports a range of applications and technologies to create a truly smart warehouse.
 
The interface of the connected warehouse is WSI 
WSI solutions are the glue of the connected warehouse because they create a single interface between different siloed applications and data sources. WSI bridges the many distinct data sources together and provides a spatial and analytical lens through which operators form actionable insights on how they can improve workforce scheduling, optimize inventory layout, increase physical space usage, and reduce facility maintenance and operational costs. In doing so, warehouse operators can make data-driven process changes and measure results as they implement swift remediations to optimize their operations. 
 
By evolving from the traditional “four walls and a roof” model to a fully connected warehouse, operators can increase the efficiency and productivity of their facilities by 20-30%. Although logistics operators have established an end goal of becoming fully automated, even the industry giants recognize it will take at least a decade to get there. By implementing innovative solutions such as WSI to bring together data from independent siloes, connected warehouses will lay the groundwork for continuous improvement through technological innovation for decades to come.