Last week we were (and still are) very excited to announce our partnership with HAI Robotics. This partnership will give the warehouses in our network access to some of the most advanced automation technology available for the warehouse/logistics industry.
This week, we think it’s important to quantify some of the impacts of this technology.
Consider just two scenarios:
- Your operation finds it can handle 4,000 orders in the time it used to take to handle 1,000 orders – with no increase in labor costs and the complete elimination of human error.
- You are able to reduce your storage density by as much as 130 percent.
What would those two impacts mean for a warehouse’s bottom line? And if you are a shipper or carrier looking for a warehouse partner, what would it mean to you to know your warehouse could perform at this level?
This is why robotics-based automation is so critical to the warehouse sector right now.
A warehouse operator recently told us that, while they typically pay $15 an hour for workers, they’ve had to increase that to $20 an hour just to get people in the door. And even when they pay that wage, they can’t find people who are consistently reliable and do good work.
This is the state of the labor market right now. The good news is that advances in robotics can handle much of the work those $15-per-hour workers used to do, and without the errors that workers make. This technology delivers benefits like improved throughput volumes, greater picking accuracies and better deployment of the human resources you have.
Robotics technology doesn’t eliminate the need for people. But with so many functions automated, it allows warehouse operators to redeploy their people to smarter and more strategic functions. They can tell the robots what to do, and the robots can perform the work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without getting tired, making mistakes or demanding overtime pay (or any pay).
Just the improvement in routing and picking optimization clearly sets the stage for a more efficient operation. It sounds like a small detail, but when you reduce the steps taken in a warehouse from 10 miles a day to 4 miles, imagine the greater throughput and overall productivity a warehouse can achieve.
Now you’re starting to see how 4,000 orders processed is possible where, in the past, only 1,000 were possible.
Warehouses are always looking to maximize their revenue while reducing their footprint. Robots can accomplish more in a small footprint than a human worker ever could, and the robotics developed by HAI are specifically designed to take warehouse operations to the highest level of excellence yet.
At pop.capacity, we are helping the shippers and carriers who access our platform to more easily search for these automation advantages and to enjoy the benefit of everything from automated dock scheduling to overall better business outcomes.
We talk often about achieving a frictionless supply chain. One principle of that is for pop.capacity to facilitate the connections between shippers/carriers and warehouses, and then get out of the way and let them work together. Another principle of that is to help the warehouses achieve the highest level of excellence in the industry.
That way the shippers and carriers in our network are not only finding available space via our platform, they’re also finding space in warehouses who have the most advanced technology and the highest-performing operations.
The automation is there. It’s designed to deliver this level of performance for warehouses. And pop.capacity is going to make sure as many people as possible experience the rewards.
