With growth in manufacturing sector in India, dependency on logistics partners is on rise. Today logistics does not merely comprise of transportation of goods rather it also enables the manufacturers to stock and distribute. Sushil Rathi takes through what are some key things to look at while having an automation solution.

 

Boom in the E-Commerce 

sector worldwide is driving adoption of technology. Use of robots, high speed sorters, wearable devices or smart glasses for faster pick-ups is in the news.  Therefore, warehouse automation is in buzz these days and everyone wants to explore it as a demonstration of their technological and process capabilities. However, there is a particular dilemma in India. We have to carefully evaluate trade-off between using human labour and machine. It would be pertinent to point out that the cost of automation may not vary much between nations such as Japan and India. But the pay-back period of 2-3 years in Japan, becomes 8-10 years in India due to the cost and availability of labour. This was a deterrent in deploying automation in Indian warehouse. However, the increasing service level demand of e-commerce with extremely skewed operation requirement compels Indian companies to go for automation. 

 

The world is becoming ever-more digital and IoT is the next step on that journey – delivering better customer practices and helping organizations achieve a competitive advantage.It is very important to identify a problem to find out automation requirement in any setup. Warehouse operators need to find out repetitive tasks that consume large amount of time or those that commonly lead to errors. Once these points are found in process, operators then can start to think about automating them. For instance, basic automation such as racking, use of MHEs, use of Warehouse Management System, use of bar-codes / scanning can be implemented and can save costs.Secondly, it needs to be understood why automation is important. With any amount of automation, the goal is to increase profitability of operation, reduce errors, scale-up for peaks and increase the safety of operation. Some benefits of automation are lower rentals due saving space, reduction in labour cost due to better productivity or replacing manual work by machine, efficient material flow, safe operation, reduction in inventory, and reduced operating cost.

 

With deployment of automation in a warehouse can scale up capacity or throughput of the warehouse without going through pain of shifting existing warehouse to a bigger one. It enhances capability of the company to handle extreme peaks without any dependencies on labour. Adding automation systems in a warehouse supports workers in their tasks while removing the monotonous, non-productive, ‘low to no’ value, reduction in fatigue or mistake-prone aspects of their jobs. Workers can be trained and can be used more effectively.

 

Key challenges to overcome

Sushil Rathi is COO at Mahindra Logistics, has an experience of over 28 years in diverse fields like sales, distribution, marketing, channel management, supply chain management and IT consulting. He has been associated with industries like automobile, consumer goods and E-commerce.