What Warehouse Automation is and When to Use it

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Credit: Getty Images by Mint Images Daily trends and hashtags tend to inject buzzwords and phrases into the public zeitgeist at a moment’s notice. One day, the scandal of the moment attracts the dreaded “-gate” suffix, and the next day, a novel term like "coronavirus" is all anyone can talk about. Warehouse automation doesn’t carry near the number of implications as the novel coronavirus, but it’s also a term that’s just entering the popular lexicon and needs some clarification. Right now, warehouse automation is still early in its relevance, prone to convolution, and reliant on jargon and acronyms. But ultimately, warehouse automation isn’t just a strategy of the moment — it provides a legitimate boost to your bottom line, workflow and company trajectory. What Warehouse Automation Can Do The individual parts of the term “warehouse automation” are self-explanatory, but some layers to the definition deserve to be spotlighted. At its core, warehouse automation is the way particular equipment, storage and retrieval systems are used to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks previously handled by humans. With warehouse automation integrated into your logistical workflow , you can devote human capital to more high-level and value-added tasks such as count, quality, and outbound load stability. Warehouse automation can also help ensure customer satisfaction and standardize processes meant to ensure capacity, accuracy and efficiency. And if peak periods look like they might overwhelm the labor on hand, automation allows you to keep pace with high demand and maintain consistency. Though the benefits of warehouse automation are obvious, they’re difficult to reap without educating staff members. Automation removes employees from the weeds of tedium and repetition. Therefore, it’s vital to educate them on why applying robotics to those long-entrenched tasks is a good thing. Defining warehouse automation requires laying out its wide-ranging impacts on […]