The trip to robot land: A travel guide for warehouse and logistics managers

To move around and move things from place to place.

To look for items and papers. ?

It is expensive and complicated.

Time is money.

Time is a lot of money, especially in Denmark, due to our relatively high salary.

Therefore, the most digitized and automated find themselves in the overtaking lane, where you can give the competitors a back wheel.

Digitizing and automating a warehouse does not have to be a big round-the-world trip. You can start small and take the journey in small stages. Here is a step-by-step guide to logistics automation developed by two Danish companies that optimize processes from manufacturing to retail and hospitals daily. Where transport robots from MiR in Odense free up human resources by taking over the movement of goods from A to B, the mobile WMS solution from Tasklet in Aalborg minimizes errors in the warehouse by digitizing the data collection using barcodes.

Stage 1: Involve those who move something

Map how materials and items move around in your production.

Talk to the employees about how and where working time freed up by automation can best be used in the workplace and how they see opportunities to create a healthier working environment.

Scrap papers and forms

Structure and digitize data by installing a Mobile Warehouse Management System. Integrate it with your ERP system if you use one. This process has a cleaning effect, showing the experience of the more than 1,300 companies in 36 countries that Tasklet has enabled since 2008 to collect warehouse data digitally - directly from a hand-held barcode scanner and into the company's ERP system.

Stage 2: Retire forklifts

Lease or buy some autonomous mobile robots (AMR). Teach the robots to find their way around the workplace by showing them around or uploading a blueprint of your production layout directly to the user interface. Then they can remember the layout in the future and calculate the fastest routes. Companies in more than 60 countries have already acquired 7,000 mobile robots from Danish MiR to transport goods in companies of all kinds.

Train operators and truck drivers in robot operation and other tasks so that you can reduce the number of potentially dangerous trucks in the workplace: figures from the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration say that in the US alone there are 35,900 serious work accidents annually and 85 deaths of employees who work with manual pallet stackers and forklifts.

?Stage 3: Design the grid

Create stops for your AMRs, e.g. with pallet racks, so that the robots can easily pick up and deliver pallets with components or goods. Draw on the experienced employees' knowledge of where bottlenecks most often occur so that you can organize the framework for a good flow.

Stage 4: Let data control the movement of your goods

Get some barcode scanners so that a warehouse employee, with a few manoeuvres on a hand-held barcode scanner, can register, among other things, the receipt, movement and picking of goods directly into the company's ERP system. Then the mobile robots can also move: They are activated instantly from the hand-held barcode scanners to carry out the internal transport of goods. The ERP system contains data about where in the warehouse or production the robots must move the specific goods or items. This means that companies do not have to man forklifts and pallet lifts with high-paid employees, who can instead spend their time on more value-creating work.

Stage 5: Lean back

- and enjoy that the logistics do not come to a standstill; No one has to stand and wait for items, even if the colleague takes a well-deserved break. Experience your turnaround time and delivery time becoming shorter, and that employee well-being increases.

Here are three examples of logistics optimization in reality

Manufacturing

Forty kilometres of daily robotic transport gives Vestfrost Solutions healthier jobs and fewer bottlenecks. The Esbjerg company, Vestfrost Solutions employees, have escaped a lot of noisy truck traffic and no longer have to push heavy trucks between departments manually. Three mobile MiR robots now quietly circulate with 80 carts, transporting raw materials, components and waste between 40 stations at the white goods factory. This has given the factory a significantly better flow because goods are available before production runs out.

Retail

The NiceHair webshop has managed to reduce time consumption by up to 94% in the receiving process at the warehouse. The company has gone from a time-consuming manual reception process that could take up to a day and a half to now having a flexible digital reception that can be completed in two to four hours. An efficient warehouse management solution with control over locations makes finding goods in the warehouse easier for NiceHair. At the same time, it has relieved the warehouse employees' workload.

Healthcare

Five hospital wards at Zealand's University Hospital in K?ge receive daily autonomous deliveries from the hospital's Sterilisation Centre. Transport around the hospital corridors is done with a mobile robot from Mobile Industrial Robots. The implementation is also part of the realization of flexible and automated logistics at the future super hospital of 190,000 square meters.

Research

A new study from Aarhus University based on 5,500 companies shows that even in a country with a lower wage level like Spain, robots create more profitable businesses and new jobs. Every year from 1990-2016, companies have answered whether they use robots or not and how their employment, productivity and costs develop.

The analyses show that the companies that introduce robots in production increase overall production by around 20-25 per cent over four years and reduce employee costs by 5-7 per cent. Also, it increases the number of jobs by 10 per cent. The myth that robots are stealing our jobs is, therefore, untrue. But it is crucial to have great flexibility in the labour market, where it is possible to move between positions and find new ways of working. That flexibility is even more significant in the Danish labour market than in the Spanish one, says associate professor Michael Koch from the Department of Economics at Aarhus BSS at Aarhus University.