Intermediate automation works best when it targets repetitive, error-prone, or bottlenecked tasks — the areas where even small improvements can create big impacts across the operation.
Austin Fort
Strategic Engagement Manager, Warehouse Solutions
With intermediate automation, a manual operation implements one (or more) technologies in a targeted approach. This results in a “semi-automated” facility, in which the automation either supports workers in completing their tasks more efficiently, accurately, and quickly. Deploying warehouse automation methodically, step-by-step, allows a company to ease into the transition from manual to semi-automated processes (and ultimately to end-to-end automation — if the business case justifies it.) To ensure a successful intermediate automation implementation, however, it’s crucial to identify the manual process(es) that will deliver the greatest operational benefits.
Matching Intermediate Automation to Manual Tasks
When considering an operation’s manual material handling processes as potential candidates for deployment of intermediate automation solutions, look for inefficiency, mistakes, or low throughput. Typically, these issues crop up around the highest volume, essential workflows that also require numerous non-productive activities to complete.
For most warehouses, those are the processes surrounding order picking and packing, or inventory receiving and put-away. When performed manually, these tasks require significant amounts of labor to travel through picking aisles, move inventory through the facility, build pallet loads, and package individual orders. Indeed, McKinsey and Company’s most recent Global Industrial Robotics Survey found that most operations automate those tasks first.
Picking orders, for instance, is frequently cited as the largest expense in a manual operation. Some estimate order fulfillment in conventional warehouses represents up to 70% of operating costs. Filling orders manually requires extensive travel as associates roam the aisles, searching for required inventory. Then, completed picks must be moved to packing via forklift, wheeled cart, or pallet jack. Deploying an intermediate automated solution to eliminate the excessive traveling allows employees to focus solely on picking. It also minimizes fatigue, which improves accuracy and reduces injury risks.
Signs a Process is Ideal for Intermediate Automation
A manual process displaying one or more of the following traits is likely ideal for an intermediate automation solution.
- Repetitive and Routine: Associates must perform the same sequence of actions repeatedly for long periods of time or large volumes of inventory.
- Frequently Congested: Workers crowd together as they attempt to complete tasks, such as filling orders, and hamper each other’s productivity.
- Risky Ergonomics and Safety: Lifting, reaching, stretching, bending, twisting, pushing, pulling, and any other extreme or repetitive movements could lead to fatigue, strains, musculoskeletal injuries, or safety risks.
- Recurring Bottlenecks: Work accumulates faster than associates can process it, often during order consolidation or packing tasks.
- Multiple Errors: Tasks that workers often make mistakes when performing, such as mundane, boring jobs or extremely complex ones.
- Inaccurate Inventory: Products are often missing, due to put-away errors or theft, resulting in incomplete orders.
Is Intermediate Automation Right for Your Warehouse?
To learn more about the benefits of intermediate automation and how to apply it in your operation, download Vanderlande’s new, free white paper. “Incremental Automation Deployments: Plotting a Path for Automating Labor-Intensive Warehousing and Distribution Operations” offers insights into how this approach can help small- to mid-sized manual facilities achieve greater accuracy and efficiency while reducing labor dependence and operational expenses.
