Every warehouse requires Thousands of SQFT areas along with huge consumption of resources like manpower, electricity, storage systems, lifting, and material handling equipment. Most industries don’t have a regulated methodology to assess this significant costs.
The Pie chart Below shows the factors and their respective % which affects the Warehousing costs.
Inventory Management
Managing the inventory plays a major role in streamlining the warehouse operations, this involves maintaining the data of the products stored in the warehouse-like their name, ID, location, quantity, date of shipments, transit details, shelf life, etc. A properly maintained inventory complements the ease of access to all the other 3 factors by
- Easing Replenishment
- Identification of the picking items
- Auto-update of the available stocks
- Generate reports for easy evaluation
- Maintaining a full proof database
All our automated systems like the Pallet AS/RS, Shuttle AS/RS, VStore, Crato – Bin shuttle, Mobile Pallet Racking, and Mini Load AS/RS incorporated with Our ERP and WMS enabling a great platform for to smooth the warehouse operations. Thanks to our in-house ERP which incorporates with external sensors and IOT for managing data efficiently thereby reducing the operation cost and better utilization of the resources.
Put Away and Retrieval
Accessing , monitoring, retrieving and put away takes much time when the warehouse size is large. In addition to this, when the height of the building is also utilized it needs to be oriented properly with easy and well-defined visual identification to enable the operators to access the materials quickly. So, we design storage solutions like Selective Pallet Racking, Shelving, drive-in racks, VStore, and AS/RS before its construction to align its orientation along with the docks/staging area so that put away and retrieval operations take place easily and efficiently.
Order Picking
Picking the exact order is very significant to get it delivered on time, in right quantities, with right quality, at right place, and to the right person, in order to reduce material handling and returning costs and to increase the maximum satisfaction of customers, the storage systems are designed to complement the material flow with different types of order picking techniques.
An automated vertical storage system like the VStore is well suited for piecewise picking, batch picking, zone picking, and cluster picking. And an AS/RS can be designed to offer the desired type of picking based on the user’s operation whilst maintaining FIFO or LIFO and cutting down movement costs. Static Storage solutions also offer wave picking, piece picking, zone picking, and batch picking which is manually monitored and adds more costs to ensure continuous material movement.
Material Handling
Reducing the handling costs by implementing the AS/RS systems, below are the comparative results between dedicated MHE and AS/RS.
| SNo | Dedicated MHE | AS/RS |
| 1 | Requires skilled labour | Anyone can operate |
| 2 | Requires certification and extensive training | Easy to train and adapt |
| 3 | Highly expensive maintenance | Cheaper periodic maintenance |
| 4 | Involves the risk of disasters | Trouble-free operation |
| 5 | The possibility to become a bottleneck | Designed to avoid any bottleneck operations |
| 6 | System height is limited to MHE | Not limited by height |
In addition to this throughput, the number of pallets handled per hour, error identification, ease of use and many more factors bring down the cost of operation significantly in the long run. For a low throughput warehouse with a lower storage need, static solutions tend to be the best option in the long run.
Sort and Access
Sorting mostly takes place during the inbound of the materials and outbound of the materials, if we can manage this flow ideally from the start then costs are well maintained till the end. Sorting the materials helps to maintain a bird’s eye view over all the above-mentioned processes and makes the verification of the stocks and operations in a warehouse much easier, providing more time to dispense on the core activities. A few types of sorting systems are cross belt sorting, line sorter, shoe sorter, etc.
For a warehouse to be a profit center all these factors are to be considered from planning the building to the storage of goods till the last-mile delivery of the supply chain.