Every facility is different, but high-level questions can give you a good idea of where to start.
Number of annualized FTEs (% Perm, % Temps)
A high variation between Perms and Temps indicates that volumes are not flat through the year or that turnover is a challenge.
Both situations indicate that you would be very well served looking at flexible automation versus typical and traditional automation.
In traditional automation you “build the church for Easter Sunday” since the technology is your theoretical throughput limit.
In flexible automation the ability to add humans and robots to scale up and down is much more effective for highly variable operations.
Handling types and units (% Units, Cases, Pallets)
The important part is the split between what workers are processing.
In FMCG businesses and other retail operations with pallets and cases the cases tend to be a lower amount of total volume (~40%) but account for over 60% of the labor costs.
This split changes as SKU proliferation happens and creates challenges related to how to account for costs in the network and size the facility appropriately.
This is where a flexible automation system, such as LogistiVIEW, with workflow and task interleaving built in could really help.
By allowing people, processes, and technology to be used as a total pool of agents to accomplish work, software automation allows the system to be much more flexible than the model we see in most WMS implementations where people log into a single function.
The old method where we only had two or three binary decision points on automation are over.
The question is no longer “is automation or technology a fit for my business” but rather “what technology and automation best positions my workforce to produce the highest and best use of their time”?
That’s how logistics can move from a pure cost center into value creation.
Shipping methods
This is a key determining factor of how you load out a facility.
Are large shipping sorters going into the back of trailers appropriate for your operation given your shipping totals?
How should you organize the inbound and outbound docks?
How many dock doors are needed for actual processing and how much dock space is needed overall?
Average size of products
This ballpark question guides storage requirements, automation availability, and the amount of manual effort typically required to move items.
Items that are of extreme sizes and weights limit the options we have in architecting an automation solution.
Automation options are also guided based on the size ranges and the Pareto (80/20) of sizes when aligned with velocity of these SKUs.
Overall throughput of the facility.
This helps determine how much potential volume we use in sizing the solution and selecting the traditional v flexible automation mix.
For very high volumes we would look at certain technologies versus low or middle volume operations.
Rate of growth is of note here as well. The traditional design is to design for current needs plus forecasted growth. That makes sense for traditional automation, which takes 2 years to design, build, and begin operations.
For flexible automation it is more important to build an iterative process to grow or contract the various constituent technologies housed within a solution set.
Order Profile
It helps to know if you are picking by order, batch, or wave, as well as what the pack out process might look like.
For order profiles that primarily consist of singles, we can consolidate picking and packing.
A high variation of order lines means we will likely need multiple pack out process flows.
In the end, the solution architecture will require a combination of all of these questions.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
We are in a new age of democratized automation where we can properly size the solution to the specifics of the problem.
The old method where we only had two or three binary decision points on automation are over.
The question is no longer “is automation or technology a fit for my business” but rather “what technology and automation best positions my workforce to produce the highest and best use of their time”?
That’s how logistics can move from a pure cost center into value creation.
Flexible Automation Investment and Savings Analysis
Ready to start your automation journey? Contact us today to request your customized automation assessment.
