The digital heartbeat of modern warehousing

The landscape surrounding modern logistics and warehousing is undergoing a profound transformation with the integration of advanced technologies, such as smart assets and inventory management, intelligent material handling and smart robotics. In this blog, we discuss recent advancements driven by the ever-changing needs for improved operational efficiencies and warehouse throughput from the same footprint.

This is an exciting topic as it brings together the possibilities allowed by advanced technologies, directly addressing the primary business needs to maximize space along with reduced turnaround times, and the potential to advance to functional dark warehousing, i.e. an operational warehouse that has limited to zero human intervention.

Besides the everyday logistical workflow demands for the in-flow and outflow of goods, there are the continually evolving global demands around greater general building efficiencies when building modern warehousing to address and comply with environmental and regulatory requirements around energy usage.

Advanced technologies: Enhancing efficiency and sustainability

With their ability to monitor and manage how general warehousing environments operate, advanced technologies can regulate and significantly enhance energy efficiency.

Additionally, the building itself offers a real-time digital inventory layout. This enables any automation used for asset or inventory storage, supported by AI, to optimize available space while considering the building’s overall energy footprint and consumption rates.

It is genuinely rewarding to help logistical businesses evolve by leveraging modern warehousing to deliver measurable benefits across efficiency of operations. This also optimizes capacity, energy, capital, and time.

In our roles at Eviden, customers often contact us about issues they’re facing, and we liaise with our technical and commercial teams to understand more specifically how we can help them in the best way. Interacting with customers from the Retail, Transport and Logistics industry is rewarding as we get to see the benefits that our work here at Eviden enables, deploying technology and partnerships towards the best ways to solve customer challenges.  These modern warehousing solutions are opportunities that translate into real-world scenarios. They leverage smart robotics to deliver a digital heartbeat.

Let me share some examples of this.

From manual to automated

Smart warehouses leverage multiple connected technologies, such as RFID and Internet of Things (IoT). These technology-driven devices range from autonomous machines to sensors and cameras, all equipped to capture and exchange data in real-time.

Sensors are used to monitor the exact measurements relevant for the business in question. For some industries, it could mean keeping temperature or humidity at a certain level. A practical example includes the warehousing of seafoods such as crustaceans and shellfish, where temperature and time play a key part in food safety. Sensors can also be applied to monitor and maintain warehousing staff safety at work.

Understanding Smart Robotics

Gartner defines Smart Robots as AI-powered machines, designed to autonomously execute physical tasks based on machine learning.

Robots in warehousing environments are nothing new, but the new possibilities that smart robotics offers can be expanded. New-generation robots are already being used for picking and packaging to maximize available space, carry out management and movement of inventory, or do different tasks.

Earlier, robots used to be kept away from people, and in the past, they were often characterized as large machines with arms. Conversely, smart robots are mechanical devices, such as autonomous trolleys with inbuilt inventory scanning and selection capabilities, which can safely move amongst humans. These are not only handled by the intelligence in the robot, but also through advanced visual technologies designed to improve safety such as Eviden’s Ipsotek Computer Vision solutions.

The heart of any digitally-enabled warehouse revolves around real-time inventory and spatial awareness. The goods need to communicate with the building management system regarding their individual status and exact location, and this information must be utilized by the real-time picking system in preparation for goods-out readiness.

Each product is assigned a unique active or passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or a QR code, and their details are entered onto a digital registry of products allowing real-time status checks of everything coming in and going out. The digital registry allows real-time maintenance of stock, which can be set up to track relevant parameters, such as age, analysis of potential shock or impact damage, temperature thresholds and humidity exposure. This reduces, or potentially removes, the necessity for time-consuming manual checks across all products.

Thanks in part to the reduction in size of modern robotic systems, and the digital registry processes available in a warehouse, it is possible to not only establish the geolocation of all products down to the square centimeter, but also utilize automation for inventory selection. This eases navigation and maximizes the use of space.

Smart warehousing has shifted the need to store products alphabetically or numerically in and around the warehouse, allowing smarter space utilization for the storage of everything from apples through to X-ray plates. Adopting Smart warehousing can improve space optimization by 25 – 30%.

Through the deployment and utilization of Smart Robotics, robots increasingly conduct some of the repetitive or physically demanding work traditionally undertaken by warehouse staff. This, in turn, frees up staff’s time so that they can focus on more value-adding elements of the warehouse operations.

Changing the game

The ethos of a Digital Heartbeat is not limited to warehousing but extends to the logic of creating unique, digitally enabled identifiers for any type of inventory or asset that is going into, or out of any controlled space. The technology applies to the medical, manufacturing, retail, and hospitality industries.

For example, a large hotel chain implemented a new system to track their laundry inventory and understand why they were losing hotel towels. The hotel chain realized that towels went missing when they were sent to the laundry service. The process was changed, and every item of hotel laundry now came with a sewn-in RFID. When laundry was collected in roll-cages by the external contractor, the hotel now had a precise, auditable inventory list of laundry collections versus returns, and could hold the external contractor financially accountable for any losses.

Another example of innovative business change is when palletizing or packing roll-caged goods, where all the available space is optimized pre-shipment. Simply put, less air is being transported. Smart warehousing, along with smart robotics logistics, often engenders sustainability initiatives and saves time, energy, space and money.

Smart robotics is essentially the digital heartbeat of various industries, not just keeping them running efficiently but changing the game and upping the quotient for better, healthier results.

• Connect with us to learn more about creating a digital heartbeat for your warehouse or logistics business.
• Learn more about how smart robotics is transforming industries.