It cannot of escaped your notice that increasingly robots of some kind or another are entering the workplace. From retail to the industrial, robots are turning up for work ready to do a day and indeed night’s work on demand.
One area where they are really making a difference is in warehousing where many of the menial tasks that comprise the day are now performed by machine rather than man. With this in mind, let’s look at key productivity advantages robot automation brings to the warehousing sector.
Productivity Boost
There can be no denying that if a task can be automated it should be. This provides significant productivity and efficiency increases. This is brought about in the following ways:
- No time off: Unlike human beings robots don’t clock off at the end of their shift or take holidays or get sick. Instead, they work around the clock 24/7. This can make a huge difference to your bottom line.
- Error free: Robots never make mistakes. Should a mistake happen it is due to an error in the setup process and not the robot itself. The robot will do what is asked of it day in day out working tirelessly.
- No salary: An automated robot requires no salary. After the initial outlay and set up it is good to go. Get warehouse robots from a good vendor, and you’ll have a reliable machine that can deliver productivity and efficiency day in day out.
- Safety: You don’t have to worry about your robot breaching health and safety rules or becoming injured. Should an unforeseen accident happen to one of your robots, you simply have it repaired.
- Reliability: Good robots provide years of service. Regular servicing keeps your robot in the warehouse where it is most effective.
With good robots, you’ll be surprised what you can achieve.
What Robots do in Warehouses
As the technology improves, new warehousing robot models come to market all the time. Here is a snapshot of what’s available right now:
- Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) – AMRs can often be found in fulfilment centres picking customer orders, zone picking, flexible sortation and autonomous piece picking. The technology used includes ‘natural navigation’ where the robot can decide a safe path when moving goods.
- Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) –By far the most used and cutting edge of all warehouse AGVs is the forklift. Here, a self-driving forklift handles pallet operations of all kinds. The better ones can read barcodes, detect pallet jack openings, detect shelf slots, and transport large pallet loads from A to B safely. The fewer humans in a warehouse the fewer accidents occur.
Although it may sound like humans are going to be made redundant, there will still be a need for people on the shop floor. The overseeing of operations will need the human touch. As such, you’ll be working alongside robots in the future rather than losing your job to one.
With robot automation, you can increase your productivity and efficiency and reduce accidents and subsequent litigation. Automate today.
