The future of warehousing

A laymans view:

I ran a couple of warehouses and have just started working for Logistex, a company that provides WMS (Warehouse Management Systems) as well as warehouse consultancy and planning, to some of the biggest organisations in the UK.

I still consider myself a warehousing layman as I have been in this role for a month and my experience of the warehouses I took over previously were shambolic and under-resourced. Automation is also relatively new to me.

One thing I have learnt though without a doubt is that not investing in your infrastructure and particularly systems to manage your inventory is a fools saving. If you have a million pounds worth of inventory in your warehouse, but have no system to monitor, report and check it how can you claim to have a million pound inventory?

A good WMS will allow reporting on everything that you do from picking ratios and stock inventory to almost any other measurable you could ever need.

If your company is above a certain size, automation in one sense or another, whether basic conveyors to complex lift systems and cranes becomes more and more likely. If you are using a best of breed WMS it will also include or be heavily interlinked with a WCS (Warehouse Control System), so that when your business does grow, automation can easily be added to your workflow.

From my whistle stop tour of various warehouse environments which ranged from the massively automated, to ones that have only just moved from paper and pen to a WMS. I have taken away people’s opinions, commentary and ideas and worked them in to what I see as the ‘future of warehousing’.

The views are my own and not the business I work for, but hopefully give someone new to the industry’s perception which might help create a talking point.

I understand I have probably got a few things wrong and forgive me for that and please tell me anything you think might help me or any comments you have at all.

The future is now….

To me some of the most advanced automations that I saw were amazing. Where the only human interaction was at the start and the very ends of the warehouse process in my opinion were already the future. It’s strange to see so many machines acting in such apparent unison, controlled by advanced processes and AI, within a WMS that churns out totes at speeds that are hard to track. It’s almost like a beautiful dance choreographed by the software, but something that I can definitely see trickling further and further down in to smaller and smaller operations.

I see the future having more and more of this automation. After all as labour and other ancillary costs rise and labour becomes more of a premium to get to market, by contrast even if automation remains at the same price it becomes more cost effective.

Automation and the ability to extend and grow well planned systems will also become easier to implement. This will in turn bring down install and host system costs making it more affordable to smaller businesses.

Standardisation will also become more and more “typical” across the industry. Understanding that this is not anti-process, but is actually a facilitator that removes error from the systems will help make this happen in my opinion.

Best-practise has been a buzzword for a long-time, but it’s also being championed at a much higher level than I have ever seen it in my years selling and supporting software systems.

The need to only use empirical data to make decisions, rather than group thought or ‘the usual way’ will also mean that while operations run very differently at a global level. They will all move towards a more vanilla warehouse.

At the moment most warehouses run two way aisles and flow around them, although some have used automation to create one way flow (particularly for picking and put away), while this is an effective method in some systems as WMS becomes more advanced this will become almost redundant. A good WMS like ours is already capable of creating best routes for picks which can save a lot of time and takes out waste from the system.

Where there’s a very high throughput I would also imagine (where cost and flow require) more and more systems using automated storage and pick towers, which allow part orders to sit and wait for a product to be replenished/available before being released.

Things that will change the future direction of warehousing in my opinion are;

Change in delivery/ collection methodology. It could be as simple as higher volume smaller collections/ or the reverse. If the like of Amazon are to be believed Elon Musk may be flying hover vehicles that run off solar power without drivers between our warehouses but I’ll wait to see more before I bet on that one.

 High/ low labour rates/ availability. If the news is to be believed Brexit will leave us 100 million warehouse workers short in 2020, but even if it doesn’t we can reasonably assume with national minimum wage and pension rates staff will be costing us a lot more.

 If the cost of automation drops massively.

Accuracy is something that should have improved year on year as technology has progressed, but from what I have seen that varies massively depending on business.

Human error is always the biggest driver of inaccuracy though and full stock accountability should be a reality in a well-run business to between 99-100%. A good WMS will make this much easier, however enforcing the process is also critical. I will hold off claiming the average business will get 100% stock accuracy and instead say they will be working towards it.

As has already been happening across workplaces paperless trading gets nearer and nearer every day. I now pay everything and make transfers on an app, order taxis by an app and get emailed receipts. I have a parcel delivered and sign the drivers’ iPad. I hope we will see very little paper in a warehouse in the future. A good WMS can take a manifest and utilise it straight from a drivers digital version and process the goods as needed so there is little reason this can’t happen.

Working towards a paperless office I see the future not having RF scanners or workstations and people just using their mobile phones to scan and process. At the moment the quality of Mobile signals and internal mobile networks is a bar but technology changes very quickly.

All of these processes I see in the future will still revolve around key workers, while they may work in a totally different way much of it will be with the same aim. Training and long term strategic planning will become the force that makes a failure or a success from whatever happens and where I have seen things working well it’s been as much in investment in the people as in automation. The strategic plans that I have seen work well have full best/worst case scenario testing as well as future scenario planning. Continuous improvement and regular re-establishment of strategy has all worked well from what I have seen, which is why I think these will become bywords in the future.

So when I say the future is already here….. I believe it can be but in my opinion requires focus, investment and a good strategic plan.

All of the benefits you can already get and I see in the future revolve around one thing… A good WMS!