Freedom to integrate best-of-breed technology delivers the flexibility, scalability, and fast ROI businesses crave. So, where do some businesses go wrong? Chris More, Head of Sales for Ferag’s UK and Nordic regions, explains below.
Competitive pressures on margins combined with ever greater expectations from customers on service, product choice, and speed of delivery, place a heavy and growing burden on the fulfilment function and its supporting intralogistics infrastructure.
Fulfilment now needs to be faster, more efficient, and infinitely flexible. It must be capable of dealing with constantly changing product profiles and more frequent peaks. A capability to leverage availability, service, and costs across slick omnichannel operations is increasingly in demand. The need for easily scalable technologies and solutions is considered essential in facilitating growth and securing future performance.
Rising Labour Costs
Set against these high demands on performance, manual processes are becoming increasingly difficult to support. Faced with escalating labour costs (Employer National Insurance Contributions rise from 13.8% to 15% this April) and a shrinking labour pool, businesses are sensibly looking to automation to build-in agility, increase responsiveness, and remain competitive.
But how should SMEs best approach a transition to, or an upgrade in, warehouse automation? How do you ensure the most appropriate technology is deployed, offering the flexibility and scalability needed, with the fastest ROI? Taking a wrong step at the outset can lead to restricted options and, ultimately, suboptimal outcomes.
Two Approaches
There are two common approaches. The first is ‘Solution Dependent’: A prospective buyer can identify a technology that looks appropriate and simply approach a manufacturer or vendor for advice. It may work out well, but there is a danger that the solution is limited to the vendor’s portfolio of products, imposing a major constraint on the solution design.
As such, the ‘Solution Dependent’ approach tends to be very limited in scope, often failing to flex for future needs. As a result, clients are locked into systems that are difficult to upgrade or integrate with new technologies.
The best outcomes result from allowing the client’s operational requirements to define the best possible solution, and then selecting and integrating the most appropriate, cost-effective technology available.
It’s all too easy to be sold a system that may work ‘okay’ but doesn’t necessarily offer you the best result – perhaps, falling short on flexibility, scalability, performance at peak, or overall value.
What’s missing here is independent informed thinking, combined with the freedom to choose best-of-breed technology.
‘Solution Agnostic’ Approach
The alternative is to take a ‘Solution Agnostic’ approach. This is where an independent integrator is chosen to select the most appropriate technology for the task.
There are many advantages to working with an independent integrator. Firstly, and most importantly, being independent means that recommendations relating to technology and potential suppliers are not determined by the need to sell a proprietary product. A good integrator with strong software capabilities can therefore bring together the very latest and most advanced technologies for the task, producing a best-in-class solution.
Automation can offer a whole host of possible solutions to a range of warehouse processes – from goods-received, storage, and order picking to packing, sorting, and despatch.
Low Capex, Fast ROI
Fast-developing technologies, such as Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) combined with pick-to-light technology, have transformed goods-to-person order processing in recent years. Such advancements have brought highly flexible and scalable, low-Capex solutions within easy reach of SMEs. However, the choices can be complex, making unbiased technical expertise an invaluable resource to tap in to.
AMRs are highly flexible and scalable forms of warehouse automation which can offer a really fast ROI. And technologies, such as zone-routing conveyors, flow-racking and cross-belt sorters, can all be brought together as a cohesive value-adding solution. Smarter picking software, along with pick-walls, can also be deployed to create continuous wave picking. This further boosts productivity and reduces dependency on labour.
As an integrator focused on delivering value to SMEs, Ferag’s ‘solution agnostic’ approach prioritises the needs of the application over a predefined technology set – ensuring the selection of the right technologies for the best possible outcome.
What Success Looks Like
A successful outcome can take many forms. For one leading retailer, significant operational benefits and savings were achieved through creating an omnichannel fulfilment operation, integrating a variety of picking, sorting, and storage methods for efficient processing of ecommerce orders as well as store replenishment. In another application, a prominent 3PL has been able to use modular automation to great effect across multiple clients, scaling up or down as demand dictates – giving the confidence to maintain performance, even at peak.
Key to successful integration of best-of-breed technology is the skilled application of versatile software. Ferag’s intelligent proprietary software, ferag.doWarehouse, has the power to connect and control a whole world of smart warehouse technologies from different suppliers. As a result, Ferag is the leading independent integrator for SMEs keen to take their first-step into warehouse automation.
More information on Ferag’s ‘solution agnostic’ integrated solutions is available at https://www.ferag.com/en/ or #perfectmatch.
