WAREHOUSING

How warehousing will evolve based on the future trends in strategic purchasing

Abstract

Many industries, those who have to manufacture their product are facing with a myriad of business pressures. On one hand, globalization and health-conscious consumers have created remarkable opportunities to develop new products, attract new customers, and explore new markets. On the other hand, unprecedented pressures to fill complex orders, cut costs, deliver orders on time, reduce waste, and optimize space have made success a daunting task. These demands have prompted logistics professionals to think more strategically and investigate automated options for their any industries warehouses that may also drive revenues growth via their supply chain. In this paper, we try to focus on, how warehousing will evolve based on the future trends in strategic purchasing.

How warehousing will evolve based on the future trends in strategic purchasing

Introduction

The future of the warehousing will evoke through making the right decisions regarding warehouse automation, it can depend on your knowledge and experience. This white paper is intended to be a resource guide for the any industry warehouse operations managers. After reading this document, you will have a basic understanding of the guiding principles of automated material handling design and information on widely used material handling technologies for pallet-based storage and order fulfillment operations in the any industry. In addition, we describe how the implementation of these technologies can benefit your operations and why one technology may be better than another.

Discussion

One of the first steps in considering warehouse automation is to assess your warehouse operation to determine if it's a viable candidate for automation. At certain thresholds of volume and dwell time (e.g. 225,000 pallets per year for 21 days or less) automated order fulfillment operations are less costly. There is a useful tool to assess your operation at http://www.activ.com/ feasibility calculator. This site can help you determine if your operation could be filling orders more profitably and will assess various scenarios such as warehouse consolidation/ automation of higher volume faster moving inventory. There are a lot of resources and experts available that can help you though this process.

Ideally, you should seek technically qualified, unbiased support when considering automated warehouse solutions for your order fulfillment operations. Independent Systems Integrators can assist you in the process of identifying appropriate warehouse material handling technologies and capacity constraints while developing solutions that align with your business requirements. Selecting a Systems Integrator is just as important as selecting the right technology. Choosing one that has the ability to independently utilize commercially available components and uses an open architecture for software will enable companies to maintain and upgrade their system for the lowest possible cost.

The most comprehensive order fulfillment solutions are developed by first answering a simple question - What do you want to accomplish? Many failures in such projects stem from overlooking basic business needs, respective of the current and future business vision and by not taking the time to clearly develop a path. Other failures have come from putting the cart ...