View original at www.expresscomputer.in

By Sangeet Kumar Sangeet Kumar, Founder and CEO, Addverb Have you ever wondered what goes behind the screens once you place an order on your computer monitor in front of you? Before the order reaches you within a 24 or 48-hour window, what would have been its journey? Dark – the new light of the warehouse Well, if you would notice in the last 14-15 years of its onset, the e-commerce industry has been a synonym for ‘explosive growth’ and there has been an exponential rise in terms of the number of SKUs they handle. Delivery time has changed significantly too; from being around 10 days to 24-hour delivery. Ecommerce has not only transformed how the businesses work but have changed the customer’s behaviour forever. The ‘want it now’ attitude of the customers is forcing businesses to upgrade their systems and processes to meet these expectations and they are assorting to automation by introducing autonomous Mobile robots, AGV for material transfer, driverless forklifts, palletising robots, Automated Storage And Retrieval System, automatic picking units through MPVs, cobots, Mobile robots, sorting robots, tilt-tray sorters, robotic packaging and depackaging units, powerful software such as Warehouse Management System, WES, MES, cloud solutions, a web of IoT solutions that provide visibility into everything inside the four walls of the warehouse, and to perfectly sync all the systems in real-time all the time. If you could conceptualise one such warehouse, yes, you are right there and welcome to the wonderful world of ‘dark warehousing’! So, what are dark warehouses? To define the nomenclature, a dark warehouse is a fully automated warehouse that operates without the use of human power. You can literally put off all the lights and let the warehouse function on its own. There is another definition to it too, which says that […]