Balancing Act: Are You Aligning Immediate Needs with Long-Term Warehouse Automation/Robotics Goals?

By Sandeep and Apoorv

In the fast-changing fulfillment ecosystem for different businesses around the world and the growing need for automation in warehouse & intralogistics space, the dilemma to Do it right the first time Vs. Build for the Future is one of the most critical decisions. 

Whether you are leading the solutions for a business or developing one for your customers, the objective for us is to help you get an inch closer in developing the Right Fit Automation decision matrix. Let’s look at the different steps that will help you define and develop a long-term strategy while taking in factors for your business volatility. 

1: Your go-to-market strategy

The 1st step in outlining your strategy will be to understand your business model and how you see that evolving in the future. There could be multiple strategies or approaches, which could include B2B, B2C, B2B2C or truly omni-channel with storefronts, online deliveries, Buy Online Pick  up at Store (BOPIS) etc. 

Sharing a personal experience from the grocery business, where our strategy pivoted towards Micro FCs (MFCs) and making our Central FC node redundant, leading to lesser yield from our Automated systems of Multi-Shuttles, conveyors, and packing lines, as they were designed for B2C orders rather inter-FC transfers. 

So, the key for you could be to ask some of these questions to business : 

• What is your North Star metric for supply chain & fulfillment?  
• What gives you the market edge over competitors, when it comes to fulfillment strategy? 
• Is the Supply chain a product differentiator for you to win the market? 
• Do you see a similar growth pattern in a region/area/city? 

2: Your Warehousing Strategy

Once you know the business needs and requirements, it’s time to focus on some of the key decisions for your warehousing strategy. These should include the following and the list is a non-exhaustive one: 

1. Storage Model & Load Unit Definition: B2B businesses will generally have the storage pattern in the form of pallets or larger holding units, for both inbound and outbound activities, while B2C will see both crates/ totes (for fashion, grocery, accessories, mobiles, general merchandise) and pallets (white goods) used in their intra & inter distribution solutions.

2. Product Profile & Order Profile: Product & Order profile varies according to industries, geographies, and business models. It is critical to understand an organization’s product profile, SKU categorization & Mix, and Order Profile & Patterns to select the automation product. Just for instance; SKU categorization is more stable and predictable in the Pharmaceutical industry as compared to Fashion & Lifestyle, enabling more accurate and robust storage design solutions in pharma as compared to Fashion & Lifestyle. 

3. Speed Vs. Density Vs. Both: Outline and address business objectives from distribution centers. The idea is to clearly define the numbers & patterns around these metrics. This is the phase where we need to focus extensively on Automation Planning.

See for historical trends, business volume, storage needs, peak fluctuations, Inventory DOH, and feed these to your automation planning model.   

3: Types of Automation & Classification

As we now have the storage modeling and planning north star defined, here we are focusing on the correlation charts outlining the expected outcome when we compare a) & c) from criteria 2. This step essentially works for the build-up of your decision matrix.