Optimising warehouse productivit

In today’s global environment, customers expect vast product ranges and rapid fulfilment, putting pressure on logistics operations to be faster, more flexible, and more efficient. Whether it’s a retail distribution centre building mixed pallets, or an e-commerce hub shipping single items, complexity is increasing. “From my perspective, choosing the right technology mix is one of the most important steps in any automation project. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. With the range of products most operations now carry, and the speed at which they need to move, integrating different types of automation within a site can deliver real operational gains,” says Jonny Gibson, Senior Sales Executive at SSI Schaefer. “Our ethos is not about promoting a catalogue, it’s about listening, analysing, and recommending what’s best for each customer. Sometimes that’s a high-end automated system; sometimes it’s a manual setup with room to scale. The key is understanding where the value lies and designing accordingly,” continues Jonny.

Understanding Your Business

The first step is to deeply understand the customer’s business, history, network, offerings, and unique selling points. Challenges within the business are discovered and resolutions included as deliverables of the project. SSI Schaefer requests available data, typically sales data for the last months or years, including peak periods, and SKU master data. Our data analysis team then use our custom-built tool, Logivision, to conduct a detailed breakdown that is used to illustrate patterns regarding peak days and hours, changes in SKU behaviours, throughput characteristics, volume movement, and more.

Solution Development

Using the agreed outcomes of the analysis, SKUs are tested against systems within our portfolio for suitability. This means that the specific parameters of each system are compared against the physical and throughput characteristics of every SKU. This process assigns SKUs to systems such that each is handled in the most efficient manner within the overall solution.

Typically, we find that very fast-moving SKUs should be handled through a manual method, as it can be much more efficient to pick from a pallet than to decant items into a system for storage and then bring them back out again for picking. The same can be true for products with a large geometric volume as well, which are small in quantity but may not fit into automation. Similarly, there are times when an automated replenishment of a manual pick face is much more efficient than using a Goods to Person (GTP) system that is fed by an Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS). There is a whole array of cases like those listed which help determine the best strategy for every SKU, and our analysis will tease all of these out.

This process means that SSI Schaefer’s systems often include multiple technologies, each tailored to a portion of the customer’s business while being integrated holistically. For example, we have systems that include an SSI Cuby Shuttle and an SSI Carrier Pouch Sorter. We also have systems that include the SSI Carrier, alongside an SSI Miniload. A-Frames are implemented with flow-racks that are automatically replenished by an SSI Flexi Shuttle, with Goods to Person picking supplied by the same system elsewhere. Small and medium sized companies often find benefit in deploying an SSI LOGIMAT vertical lift module initially, and then integrating more complex systems as the business grows. The possibilities are endless, and our experienced applications engineers always develop the best solutions for you, all from a single source.

If you are interested in exploring the world of intralogistics and don’t know where to start, please get in touch and we can work with you to find the best options for you and your business: www.ssi-schaefer.comThe post Optimising warehouse productivit first appeared on Warehouse & Logistics News.