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Warehousing – Emerging scenario
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Saturday, 30 July, 2022, 12 : 00 PM [IST]
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Yasmin Basheer Ahmed
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The warehousing industry continues to produce tech driven innovation as globally business aim to identify and adopt new technologies that improve warehouse operations minimise cost and enhance overall supply chain efficiency. The pandemic has certainly played a major catalytic role in booking the logistic industry with a drastic shift towards digitisation and contactless operation customers that traditionally operated offline went online.
Modern warehouses, as the most important component of warehousing logistics, are a complex technical structure, which includes several interacting and complementary elements of the logistics system, providing the functions of accretion, processing and distribution of goods between end users. The warehouse is considered as a combined component of the logistics chain, which allows achieving a high level of profitability.
Warehousing and processing of goods are important components of the logistics activities of retailers, manufacturers, distributors, and industrial enterprises. The cost of their implementation absorbs up to 40% of logistics costs.
Impact of Covid-19 spread and related to it quarantine measures on the warehouse real-estate market
Warehouses in India are almost equal to international standards in terms of quality which reassures more investors to invest an attract Multi nationality company, who needs such services. Global manufacturing company has been stepping into the country to build industrial hubs that can launch an incremental supply base for them. Effective capacity management is the basis of a functional warehouse capacity planning is complex through requiring ongoing analysis of the four PS: such as product, promotion, pecan, and predicament.
The warehouse of the future will take advantage of automated capacity management but leveraging technology for better data driving capacity planning. the warehousing industry continues to produce take driving revolution as business intended to identify and adopt new technologies that improve warehouse operations to reduce costs and improve overall supply chain efficiency. The inventive technologies that help you enhance warehousing operations all over the world.
Accelerated Dark house warehouse research and development:
Dark warehouses promise to be nearly fully automated and autonomous, operating virtually free from human intervention – aside from planning, maintenance and ongoing optimization. They will operate 24/7/365 in no light (thus, the term dark warehouse) and in extremely cold or warm conditions, thus saving energy and related costs. They promise to assistance to solve the labour shortage and drive incredible efficiency.
However, full concepts are still at least two years away and live implementations are at least three years away. Breakthrough technologies in robotics, sensing and control, and IT are still needed. But demand is so strong that it’s beginning to drive more aggressive R&D investment to achieve these breakthroughs faster.
Meanwhile, forward-looking warehouse operators are starting the journey to dark warehouse by not only putting automation piece parts in place as described above, but also tying technologies together via software, such as Warehouse Execution Systems, allowing all the technologies to communicate.
Some of the innovative technologies that help you enhance warehousing operations all over the world are:
1. 3D printing: 3D-printing technology significantly increases the production process, making it independent of specialized industries and enterprises. This will allow manufacturers to print" the necessary products and various components on demand, which will reduce the supply chain, eliminating the need to store large volumes of finished products in warehouses. The introduction of 3D printing for the logistics industry has huge growth potential. The logistics provider will be able to supply raw materials instead of finished products, provide 3D printing services at delivery points, which will be an additional source of income. For such purposes it will be possible to use the electronic library of projects, available on a local computer, and print the part. Worn parts can be scanned in 3D-mode and re-created.
2. Robotisation: With the help of warehouse robots (manipulator robots, palletiser robots, sorting robots, and mobile robotic carts), automation of warehouse operations are carried out. Eliminates mistakes, reduces defects and minimizes accidents and risks to people. Accelerates the efficiency of warehouse operations, also increases the productivity and reduces the costs.
3. Cloud technology: Data warehouses have been staples of enterprise analytics and reporting for decades. But they were not designed to handle today’s explosive data growth or keep pace with end users’ ever-changing needs. With cloud data warehousing, it is no longer constrained by physical data centres and it can now dynamically grow or shrink your data warehouses to rapidly meet changing business budgets and requirements. Like a traditional data warehouse, a cloud data warehouse stores information from a variety of disparate data sources such as IoT, CRM, finance systems, and many others.
Because the data in a cloud-based data warehouse is highly structured and unified, it's at-the-ready to support a wide variety of specific business intelligence and analytics use cases.
Modern cloud architectures combine the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. Here we discuss the advantages in performance, scalability and cost when implementing a cloud-based data warehouse over a traditional data warehouse.
Faster Insights: A cloud data warehouse provides more powerful computing capabilities, and will deliver real-time cloud analytics using data from diverse data sources much faster than an on-premises data warehouse, allowing business users to access better insights, faster.
Scalability: A cloud-based data warehouse offers immediate and nearly unlimited storage, and it’s easy to scale as your storage needs grow. Increasing cloud storage doesn’t require you to purchase new hardware as an on-premise data warehouse does, and you’ll pay a fraction of the cost.
Overhead: Maintaining a data warehouse on-premises requires a dedicated server room full of expensive hardware, and experienced employees to oversee, manually upgrade, and troubleshoot issues. A cloud data warehouse requires no physical hardware or allocated office space, making operational costs significantly lower.
4. Internet of things: The Internet of Things (IoT) is already shaking up the world of warehousing. IoT fosters better communication and collaboration between supply chain partners, plus greater accountability across the board. IoT adoption will continue to grow over the next decade as technology costs are now within reach for many warehouses and logistics operations. Other benefits of IoT include:
- The ability to readily identify risks in the supply chain
- Provides real-time data on weather and other conditions causing shipment delays
- Helps companies meet chain-of-custody regulations for sensitive cargo
- Reduces damaged and lost goods, as well as equipment damage
- Precise location data reduces the time it takes to locate specific inventory
- Improves inventory management and forecasting accuracy
5 Drones: The year 2022 is likely to witness drone technology in warehousing. Large retail companies such as Amazon have successfully used drones in their warehouses for inventory management. Smaller retailers will probably be following their example and enjoy the benefits of drone technology.
For example:
- Two drones can do the job of about 100 humans and do it more accurately.
- Aerial drones equipped with special cameras with optical sensors can find items and scan respective barcodes from 10 meters away with a close to 100% accuracy rate.
6. Artificial intelligence:
As the Indian warehousing industry has entered into an era of consolidation, more and more advanced technologies such as robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are likely to be integrated in 2022. Although in labour-intensive countries like India, implementing full-scale robotics is a little difficult, as certain tasks will always be cheaper if undertaken by humans, warehouse managers are trying to find ways to implement robotics, machine learning, and AI into the back end to improve operations. With such technologies, the Indian warehousing industry will witness almost 2X growth in the next 2 years.
What are the implementations of these solutions that will dominate 2022?
- Automation of labour-intensive activities such as self-managing inventory systems, self-driving forklifts, autonomous ground vehicles, and other tasks that reduce manual dependency.
- Real-time tracking of warehouse operations and shipping through business intelligence, which will ultimately transform warehouse management. The process will mainly consist of AI-powered inspections, packaging, and more.
- Forecast demand through warehousing solutions.
The Covid-19 pandemic suddenly made warehouse operations aware just how vulnerable they were to UN for seen disruption. enormous difficulties in staffing employee safety and supply chain delays became the order of the day as a result risk management has risen in prominence that risk management seeks to take pre emptied action to minimise disruption to operations such as delays product damage and threat to employee safety also managing a warehouse in today's climate can be challenged hence these trends can change and give solutions to keep operations running at peak performance.
The development of digital technologies has greatly influenced the drones, IoT, additive technologies, etc. the efficiency of warehouse and supply chain management increases, especially for non-standard solutions, which significantly stimulates the market; accelerates the efficiency of warehousing operations, optimization of inventories in the supply chain, increases productivity and quality, reduces costs.
(The author is lecturer, department of clinical nutrition at University of Hafr Al Batin. She can be reached at ybahmed@uhb.edu.sa)
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