Could your business scale up with a better warehouse?
Is your warehouse holding back your business growth? Let's explore how bottlenecks in warehouse operations can stifle eCommerce scalability and efficiency. Automation can streamline fulfillment processes, unlocking new revenue opportunities, and improving operational flow. Discover why investing in warehouse automation may be the key to eliminating barriers and driving long-term success.
Holland Group is a family-owned and operated company that has been in operation for over 5 generations of farmers, growing and selling plants. In 2004 the company decided to be an early adopter of e-commerce, and launched a storefront to sell their bulbs to customers online. Since then, the company now has 6 separate brands, with over 1,300 different SKUs of plants.
How much can you save by automating DIM weight? More than you think. Learn how inaccurate measurements can have you paying way too much for shipping. And while measuring DIM weight may not seem like a top priority when deciding how to automate your warehouse, implementing dimensioning equipment can have a relatively large impact. When every package can be scanned, weighed, and measured efficiently, ensuring that only accurate information is provided to the carrier, things like chargebacks, special handling fees, and bad packaging decisions become a thing of the past.
For WWT, their warehouse operations require the company to receive and ship large volumes of valuable electronics equipment that goes into building data servers and supporting their corporate clients. Shipping errors are costly, and delayed shipments can have a big impact on client relationships. StreamTech Engineering worked with World Wide Technology (WWT) to redesign two outbound shipping automation systems. The existing processes were inefficient, and required manual decision-making for each package. The goal of the project was to achieve a system that could reliably process the wide variety of sizes of their outbound parcel shipments. StreamTech Engineering delivered a SLAM system that accommodates the wide range of package sizes, unique labeling requirements, and sortation, all managed by the StreamTech Warehouse Control System (WCS) software.
FCP Euro Uses Automation to Improve Company Culture and Customer Satisfaction
For FCP Euro, customer satisfaction is the primary driver for everything they do. The “customer-first” mindset has permeated across the company culture, so much so that many of their customers become employees. It’s for this reason they have a unique approach to implementing automation within their operations. Instead of using automation as a labor reduction mechanism, FCP Euro took the approach that implementing automation could elevate their company culture by allowing many of the team members from the shipping and fulfillment team to move into new responsibilities within the company.
The material flow in a modern warehouse equipped with Goods-to-Person (G2P) robots and integrated technologies is a seamless and highly efficient process. Here's a breakdown of each step involved, highlighting how different technologies contribute to a streamlined operation. G2P robots efficiently bring items to designated picking stations where human workers or automated systems can quickly access the products needed for each order. This minimizes walking distances and waiting times, significantly speeding up the picking process.
As challenges in the industry evolve, automation has become a crucial tool. It enables 3PLs to improve operational capabilities by streamlining processes, reducing errors, and freeing up resources for strategic initiatives. In this article, we will walk through the fulfillment process, from picking to shipping, providing practical ways that automation can help address these challenges.
We know that dealing with shipping errors can feel like a never ending battle. It's frustrating, time-consuming, and, frankly, a bit disheartening when the hard work of your team doesn't translate into flawless operations. Every mispicked item or incorrect order not only reflects on the team's efforts but can also ripple out, affecting customer satisfaction and your bottom line. Designed to reduce manual order picking errors, the system relies on our WCS Picking Software and LED light devices to direct the operators. Our technology addresses key logistics challenges, improving both operational performance and customer satisfaction.
In today’s competitive environment, it’s important to evaluate operating costs and find new and innovative ways to optimize operating expenses without sacrificing productivity. Some of the leading expenses for warehouses include the cost of manual labor, consumables/packaging, and carrier shipping charges. Of these three, manual labor is the leading ROI driver for operators who are considering automation equipment. Coincidentally, automation can also help optimize the other areas as well (packaging, consumables, and carrier costs) when done thoughtfully. We’ll save those topics for another article, but for now, let’s focus on labor.
Warehouse automation promises to not only streamline operations, but also to drastically improve efficiency and scalability. But the pressing question remains: Is the investment worth it? Return on Investment (ROI) is a key financial metric used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiencies of different investments. In the context of warehouse automation, ROI helps determine the financial return you can expect from investing in automation technologies compared to the cost of the investment. This calculation is essential in making informed decisions, as it provides a quantifiable measure of the potential benefits relative to the cost.
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