Destination Optimization: How automation not only improves warehouse efficiency, but overcomes truck delivery issues
Author: Marissa Dierlam, TGW North America (Guest Contributor)
Summary: In an already difficult labor market, let’s examine how warehouse automation can help the most important person outside of the warehouse – the truck driver.
Truck driving is already physically demanding job. And if a driver – particularly a foodservice truck driver with frozen, chilled, and ambient storage together – needs to sort your goods when delivering to a customer, that adds another level of difficulty to an already difficult job. Not only does this extra effort lead to slower customer deliveries, but it could also lead to driver turnover. In an already difficult labor market, let’s examine how warehouse automation can help the most important person outside of the warehouse – the truck driver.
Semi-truck drivers, especially those in the grocery/foodservice sector, have some of the most complex delivery pallets in material handling. Perishable items, fragile items, and items that need to be stored at different temperatures make it difficult to build pallets for the customer. Drivers often spend additional minutes, possibly hours, unloading and breaking down pallets to make sure customers get what they ordered. That’s because warehouses still using manual picking with human labor build pallets to maximize picker efficiency, instead of customer or location efficiency. And that can cause issues with truck unloading, including injuries from lifting and moving items in the truck, and slower delivery due to the extra minutes unloading, which can lead to dissatisfied drivers who won’t stay around long. It can also lead to fewer deliveries per truck load and lower order efficiency for your business. These issues can be avoided with warehouse automation.
How do you Stack Up?
If running a warehouse with manual picking, typically picking paths are maximized for picker efficiency. Pickers grab items that are close together with items grouped by the sections of the warehouse they are located in. This keeps pickers from having to walk miles and miles around the warehouse. Order pallets are then built based on what items are closest together and easiest for pickers to gather. While this is efficient for the labor in the warehouse, it creates a problem when drivers deliver pallets to customers that require final location sorting to get them off the truck.
What if you could build pallets based on the order received and/or the destination the pallet is going to? With warehouse automation, you can. Automation has several advantages that will increase everyone’s efficiency throughout the order process.
The first thing automation can do is bring goods to the pallet being built instead of employees pulling pallet jacks or driving “walkie riders” to the goods and manually building the pallet, reducing walk time and physical strain by employees – leading to faster order fulfillment. Second, and more importantly, a WMS integrated into the automation can organize pallets by combining information on order, customer, and destination, making each pallet contain only what a specific customer or location needs while stacking goods up safely. Automation paired with software allows warehouses to build pallets by optimizing where items are going, which leads to easier truck route stop offloading.
And the benefits don’t stop there. A driver who can maximize drop-off times can do more stops per route, which increases delivery efficiency. Called ‘destination optimization,’ a warehouse has now increased operational efficiency and decreased workload for both warehouse employees and drivers, leading to higher retention rates.
Automation: More than Robots
While most people think of warehouse automation as robots doing the work, automation systems can’t run on robots and mechanical equipment alone. The software running these programs is what makes the system work effectively. The WMS is designed to understand your specific inventory – the weights and dimensions of every SKU in your warehouse. The software will take that information and combine it with all the orders coming in and the location of where those items are going, whether it’s 50 miles away or 500 miles away. The software combines that knowledge with route planning and pallet building to create the most appropriate pallet.
In fact, one food service company that recently automated reported being able to increase their delivery stops per route by about 30 percent because drivers did less sorting during stops. *
Automation: Benefiting the Warehouse and Beyond
For those contemplating warehouse automation in their operations, the benefits to warehouse employees and picking efficiency may already be known. But knowing that automation benefits those inside and outside the warehouse – and ultimately your customers – adds one more level of optimization and one more reason to consider an automation solution for your business.
* Because every business is unique, results will vary
About the Contributing Author:
Marissa Dierlam is the Head of Marketing of TGW North America.
