Vineet Baid, CEO, Falcon Autotech, talks about the automation required in the warehousing how it can make the functioning more smooth and efficient.

Essentially, if you divide entire warehouse into set of sub activities, right from receiving items or Inbound to taking it to the racks or counting of products or doing a quality inspection or picking it up from the racks or packaging it or sorting it to some sort of logic whether you want to sort it for courier partner or sort for cities, there are a lot of room for automation or mechanization that is currently open.

We are saying that the system would be able to direct the product to the right selves or the rack given the volume of the product that volume need to be captured using some machine, that machine is a basic volumetric machine, i.e. weighing and dimensioning machine. On which if you keep product and it will give you weight and dimension, it is a simple machine and if you deploy that then you probably get in more control of using warehouse space better.

There is notion with respect to machination in automation that it is only suited for higher scale warehouses or fulfillment centers, there are bunch of semi automation products available which are relevant to lower through-put service centers as well.

Typical Problems in Supply Chain Today

1. Rising labor cost
2. Availability of time
3. Accuracy

Cost of errors is increasing day by day, so earlier if you committed an error in supply chain then probably the customer would still stick to you, now a days if you deliver one wrong product to a customer then there is greater likelihood that the customer would defect. So the cost of error in terms of losing a customer is increasing day by day, so all of these points to requiring to set up a supply chain operation, which is much more consistent and flexible, and all of these could be achieved through range of automaton products, which are available in market today.

For a typical sortation system, if you deploy a manual resource to sort a packet, It may sort around 300 Packs/Hr, But if you deploy a machine it may sort 7000 Packs/Hr depending upon machine you deploy.

Such a significant jump in productivity is what we are looking at if you deploy the right set of equipment’s, and there are sorting systems available for 3500 Packs/Hr, 1000 Packs/Hr and so on.

There is complete range of automation solutions available and you can choose one, which is more relevant to your usages.