Tag Archive for: goods-to-person

Introducing Automation Can Reduce Employee Turnover

How Introducing Automation Can Help Reduce Employee Turnover

We hear from our clients that labor is the biggest challenge in their business every day. In particular, labor availability and turnover are often mentioned as issues companies are desperate to find a solution for.

The costs associated with employee churn add up in a tangible way for fulfillment and distribution centers. On average, the total cost of a warehouse associate is roughly $50,000 per year (a $20-per-hour wage at 2,500 hours per year), and the average cost of replacing that associate is roughly 25% of their total cost.

In a warehouse that employs 100 associates, those costs start at $500,000 per year. Then you should consider the costs of training new employees, onboarding, unemployment taxes, and additional overtime required to keep your operations running at the desired rate.

While labor appears to be the problem, here at Storage Solutions, we believe employee walking is the most detrimental activity in a warehouse. Though there are management-level and HR-level tactics to reduce turnover, we can’t ignore the reality that no one likes walking around a facility for miles daily. In addition to walking, manual pick processes are rigid on your associates’ physical well-being. With so much competition for the labor out there – and competitors constantly offering slightly higher wages and signing bonuses to warehouse workers, why would an employee continue to work for you?

Automating your pick process can drastically improve your employee’s job quality, so they aren’t interested in going elsewhere. By introducing goods-to-person picking technology, for instance, warehouses:

  • Essentially eliminate walking from the job. You automate the picking and delivery of a product from storage to a place where your associate can be stationary at a pick station and conduct their business, rapidly expediting the picking process and keeping your employees from manually transferring packages across long distances.
  • Give your best employees higher-level tasks. Employees loyal to your company can be rewarded by focusing on higher-level tasks rather than walking. No one wants high labor intensity levels when they can use their brains more than their feet.
  • Reduce onboarding and training costs. If you operate a 500,000-square-foot warehouse storing a high volume and variance of SKUs without automating your pick process, it takes a while to learn which product is stored in every location. When employee churn is high, it can lead to a slower pick speed and a higher number of inaccurate orders.
  • Improve accuracy and nearly eliminate costs of inaccurate orders. An automated solution can dynamically learn where products are stored and deliver goods with nearly-perfect precision. These solutions help your bottom line by increasing fulfillment speeds and reducing product returns. It is estimated that each return costs up to $50, which adds up quickly in high-volume fulfillment scenarios.

How Can We Help?

Automated solutions reduce your reliance on manual labor and unpredictable labor markets. Storage Solutions has formed partnerships with several of the industry’s most dynamic, innovative, and creative technology providers and has the operational experience to implement the right solution to meet your business goals.

We take an agnostic approach to learn your unique challenges and provide options with return on investment in mind that help you scale as your needs change.

Click here to let us know how we can best assist you, or give us a call today, so we can learn about your challenges and begin to develop a roadmap to help you grow faster without relying on the dynamics of the ever-changing labor market.

Dynamic Solutions Beat Labor Challenges

Dynamic Solutions to Beat Today’s Labor Challenges

Throughout the supply chain, businesses are experiencing labor challenges in various ways, and it has taken a toll on throughput and profitability for many.

First of all, labor availability is at an all-time low, and fulfillment centers are routinely operating at below capacity because of it. That puts undue pressure on the remaining workers, who are then overextended in attempting to meet consumers’ increasing expectations on quicker delivery for an ever-increasing share of e-commerce orders. In this environment, fulfillment centers are also adjusting to fewer shipments of full pallets and a more significant share of each or order picks, which are more expensive and lead to increased labor costs.

Plus, because labor availability is so low, companies are required to raise wages – and sometimes add bonuses – to attract new employees. That factor makes employee retention more difficult because now there is more competition for those higher-paying jobs, so workers are more apt to jump from one company to another. So, in changing careers and changing companies, quality control is affected as more employees need to be trained.

In short, the labor market is a mess right now. COVID-19 and other external factors have caused a dramatic shift in supply chain employment, and companies are feeling the pain of all these changes. Some have adopted dynamic strategies to reduce dependency on human labor for fulfilling orders, and some are in the process of investigating potential options for their operations.

In fact, one of the most common themes we hear from clients is that they may have waited too late, and now they need to play catch-up. We have found that clients are getting their biggest “bang for the buck” on integrating solutions around their picking, packing, and replenishment operations.

Below are a few dynamic solutions we design and provide that may help your business catch up to meet today’s challenges, but in reality, these solutions should also come with a roadmap to help your operations adapt to future challenges that may be unforeseen.

Adding Conveyor and Sortation Solutions

Conveyor and sortation solutions can be a solvent for labor challenges, primarily by reducing the amount of physical travel required by transporting products long distances within a facility. Through proper design, conveyors can dramatically improve fulfillment speeds, add quality control, and improve safety in a facility.

Even if you have a conveyor system currently running in your facility, it may be time to re-evaluate your design as demand and needs change. Retrofitting existing conveyors with new parts, sortation solutions, or new motors can also make a sizeable impact on your replenishment, picking, and packing efforts.

Condense Your Footprint with Vertical Lift Modules

While condensing your storage doesn’t always directly solve labor challenges, vertical lift modules (VLMs) offer various benefits to fulfillment operations, particularly when it comes to picking items to a cart. VLMs offer a fully-automated goods-to-person picking and storage solution that can be ideal when your process involves small-to-medium products.

Pick-to-light batching tables can be incorporated to allow for picking multiple orders to drive higher pick rates and eliminate guesswork from the batching process. With these high pick rates and additional throughput and accuracy, you can drive labor savings.

Introduce Automated Warehouse Robotics

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) are two typical warehouse solutions to labor challenges because of their fulfillment rates, operational costs, safety benefits, and order accuracy. Our partners at Fetch Robotics and inVia Robotics work with your labor force to support replenishment, picking, and transportation of products. These solutions can be installed as a subscription service, meaning you don’t have to invest in massive infrastructure at your facility.

These solutions integrate with your warehouse management systems (WMS) to optimize pick paths to support your pick process or do the picking entirely, depending on your needs. Ultimately, though, they remove the costliest aspect of fulfillment – humans walking through a warehouse.

Reduce Costs When You Automate Your Packaging

Especially as a greater share of orders are being shipped individually than by-the-pallet, automating your packaging process can support increased throughput and lower labor costs. From case sealers to auto-baggers to print-and-apply labeling systems, there are several solutions that can prevent you from paying someone to package individual or group orders.

These end-of-the-line solutions can automatically measure and add void-fill, reducing waste, freight costs, and can improve customer satisfaction along the way.

Invest in Automation with Goods-to-Person Picking Systems

Even if you have no level of automation in your operations, it may be worth investigating how to integrate automated goods-to-person picking systems in your facility. However, before diving in too deep, we recommend speaking with an expert that has conducted a data-driven analysis of your material flow to determine the right solution for your business goals.

Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS) can come in cart-based solutions, crane-based solutions, cart-crane combinations, mini-load AS/RS, and more. They all drive extremely high pick rates, optimal storage design, ergonomic support and can scale as your business goals grow. However, because there are so many options out there, finding the right solution requires the design and expertise of a proper project partner. We’d be happy to discuss these options with you!

Need Some Advice? Contact an Expert

Our team of experts has experience with various solutions that can relieve the dependency on labor and drive an ROI by increasing your throughput. For us, solving labor challenges is less about eliminating workers but more about keeping your best employees around by making their jobs more accessible, more consistent and creating opportunities for less wear-and-tear per pick.