Goods To Person Automation

Strengthen your ROI with Goods To Person Automation

Ever wonder how consumer goods companies are evolving in today’s digital economy to keep up with heightened customer expectations? What’s the future of businesses of moving goods? And, what’s the benefit of swapping the traditional person-to-goods model with goods-to-person automation. Let’s have its overview and how it marks the future of efficient business operations.

Most of the distribution centers, especially small-scale ones, rely on a person-to-goods picking model. This means warehouse operators work physically through storage containers and maze of shelves to search, collect and move required items for order fulfillment. Today’s converging trends and progressing technologies are pushing this conventional approach to the breaking point.

Now, distributors need a well-developed supply chain ecosystem to ensure peak operator performance by eliminating the time required to search for items. As automated goods-to-person picking is becoming a new standard, the consumer goods companies significantly move to automate their systems.

Manufacturers and distributors are shifting their focus to automated systems with the approach of making their processes better every day with improved visibility. They strive for trading complexity for business sustainability and avoiding diminished profitability by automating warehousing and supply chain functions. They strive to drive continuous improvement by using an automated goods-to-person system providing end-to-end agility and flexibility in response to consumer demands.

Person-to-Goods vs. Goods-to-Person:
The traditional person-to-goods process is challenging, particularly when dealing with a high volume of items. This usually happens in big organizations with a large number of orders to fulfill. Small setups can easily manage their stock and physical transactions. However, to add speed and agility in your business of any scale, you better use automation for goods to person picking and moving materials.

This material handling and moving automation model will help release the pressure of managing an exploded number of SKUs (stock keeping units) and deliver the finished goods to the customer faster.

How come?
The good to person robots bring the inventory to the workers or directly to the warehousing loading dock instead of workers navigating and searching the rows of shelves and containers for required inventory.

This process, unlike the traditional person to goods model, is simple and scalable. Every process is an automated process – from goods arriving in the warehouse, their arrangement as individual items, or a unit load or in SKUs. These will be placed into trays (for larger items) or totes (for smaller items) and these containers are then sorted in automated retrieval systems using robotics or carousel systems. Next comes the role of goods to picker, which entails the process when an item is required for an item, the picker will simply request it through a container holding the SKU and it will be automatically retrieved and transported to the picker at a centralized station.

Automation eases the warehouse workers’ job as it comes in different configurations such as;

• Put wall (hybrid solution)
• Vertical carousels
• Horizontal carousels
• Automated Conveyors
• Vertical Lift Modules (VLMs)
• Robots (floor robots, robotic shuttles)

All these solutions are scalable, allowing the supply chain industry leverage in increased productivity and operational efficiency with minimal infrastructure and human resource investment. For instance, in goods to person robotics you need to integrate more robots into the system to increase production.

Since, automation influences the storage capacity, productivity requirements and therefore companies push themselves for more efficient goods-to-person automated tools and systems replacing the conventional, slow and labor-intensive model. That’s why companies are now turning to third-party supply chain and logistics for goods to person automation to keep up with the changing customer demands.

The real question is whether your business is ready to be part of an increasingly intelligent and automated business world. MWI Solutions provide goods to picker automation as an affordable and scalable solution for streamlined supply chain operations.