WMS&Shopfloor automation: how d-one brings it together!
For the last five years, we have experienced strong global demand for warehouses, mostly driven by eCommerce. Across the world, we have seen how new warehouses have started to become part of the overall habitat. Pandemic supply chain woes have not changed that dynamic, and now that we are seeing some signs of normalcy, the interest in warehouse space continues to be strong across most verticals.
As we continue to experience this growth, we are also experiencing significant challenges in growing warehouse space. Cost, delivery times, and even some regulatory constraints have limited the speed at which new warehouse capacity can be expanded. Most F100 companies are now seriously looking at any and all possibilities in increasing the productivity of the existing warehouses to keep up with the growth in working capital.
Warehouse automation technology is the first obvious option we all look at. New generations of automation offer many options: AMR’s, AS/RS, cobots, G2P’s, and Articulated Robotic Arms are a few of what technology has to offer today. Budgets for a 250,000-square-foot facility can easily escalate over $1MM in investment. While there are as many success stories involved in automation, we are all familiar with an equal number of failed projects when automation does not fully deliver.
At Digitalsoft we have discovered that many failed warehouse automation initiatives are due to the lack of consideration of the “full picture”. What we find in our own implementations is that one key reason for dissatisfaction is that companies struggle in leveraging the full potential of their WMSs; there are many reasons for this. Recently we encountered a situation in a medical technology company that, despite many costly robotic investments, the main challenge they faced was the adequate allocation of inventory upon the adoption of the serialized product. Many medical technology companies operate warehouse environments with both serialized and non-serialized inventory, all being handled by the same WMS. We are glad that our d-one WMS can assist our customers in managing through this dual status and also provide an easy-to-use platform that allows for high-order volume processing with seamless inventory allocation.