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There's something to be said for building the entire warehouse to support automation, versus trying to build a robot that can work in any warehouse.

monkeydust 6y ago
True but there is massive long tail of warehouses in operations where this is not possible right now so I can see this working. Does anyone know the cost?
yellowapple 6y ago
The problem is that building the entire warehouse to support automation from day 1 requires a lot of upfront costs that only the largest orgs can reasonably afford. And it's remarkably easy to screw up, such that the automation doesn't end up being all that effective or itself introduces inefficiencies. It ain't like software, either, where it's (comparatively) easy to refactor things; if you fuck up an automation project, it's gonna be stuck that way for years. Besides, in my experience (as a professional in this exact field of warehouse / supply chain / fulfillment operations), the biggest gains are usually process-related, and adding robots doesn't really help. The average warehouse tends to have ridiculously inefficient processes, driven by clunky and cumbersome software. Things like aisle zoning / pick path planning (i.e. minimizing the distances pickers have to travel for average pick orders, and minimizing contention between pickers and replen), data entry automation (e.g. barcode scanners and computerized scales instead of manual data entry), precise and measured use of conveyors, etc. help maximize the return on every labor dollar spent. These things can all be done incrementally to good effect. That is, to your point: throwing robots at an inefficient warehouse just gets you an inefficient warehouse full of robots. And yes, designing the warehouse from the ground up to support automation as efficiently as possible is a good idea, but focusing on human efficiency will get you 90% of the way there - and then you can spend the other 90% of that effort on whiz-bang software and droids ;)
- bsanr2 6y ago
  The clerks at the warehouse I worked at spent 30 min-1 hour every day hand-collating order manifests because whatever system that spit them out (from some contractor or corporate?) did so as PDFs that couldn't be easily modified. Literally building packets that were similarly structured, every night, by hand. I did what I could with Excel macros to automate as much as I could, but I'm not a trained coder and I definitely didn't have security access to implement the tools that could have saved us huge headaches. I wondered quite a bit who the hell up top got paid to set up this process.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    Yep, sounds like a classic case of an ERP or order management system throwing documents over the wall because "well all the data's there, so the warehouse can figure it out". And as for "who got paid", probably some COBOL programmer who retired decades ago and is now living the dream entirely offline in a beach house in Costa Rica. Which goes to show that the warehouses themselves are only part of the battle. Just as critical is the whole org holistically taking downstream impacts into account. It's why I make it a point to be on the warehouse floor, doing the ground floor work firsthand, talking to warehouse workers, understanding and observing for myself where the bottlenecks are. That's the only way to really know you're actually helping.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    PDFs can be pretty horrible, but you can ingest them through Excel's Power Query these days if they actually have the text embedded. I got annoyed with importing data for taxes in one instance recently and actually was able to recover all the data from a printable PDF form to then turn into a standard format. There are so many parts of Excel that seem designed by different groups at different times, with varying levels of stability and sense-making, and so I think it takes a lot of experience just to know what exists and when to access it. My approach these days is to do anything I can in Power Query and anything I can't in VBA. And those can connect to virtually anything. I avoid other stuff such as Power BI, the data model, DAX, formulas on worksheets, etc. due to painful experience.
bsanr2 6y ago
Well, now you have to pay for building the warehouse, and hope that the tech it's built around doesn't become outmoded before the upfront costs are made back + profit.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

monkeydust 6y ago

True but there is massive long tail of warehouses in operations where this is not possible right now so I can see this working. Does anyone know the cost?

yellowapple 6y ago

The problem is that building the entire warehouse to support automation from day 1 requires a lot of upfront costs that only the largest orgs can reasonably afford. And it's remarkably easy to screw up, such that the automation doesn't end up being all that effective or itself introduces inefficiencies. It ain't like software, either, where it's (comparatively) easy to refactor things; if you fuck up an automation project, it's gonna be stuck that way for years. Besides, in my experience (as a professional in this exact field of warehouse / supply chain / fulfillment operations), the biggest gains are usually process-related, and adding robots doesn't really help. The average warehouse tends to have ridiculously inefficient processes, driven by clunky and cumbersome software. Things like aisle zoning / pick path planning (i.e. minimizing the distances pickers have to travel for average pick orders, and minimizing contention between pickers and replen), data entry automation (e.g. barcode scanners and computerized scales instead of manual data entry), precise and measured use of conveyors, etc. help maximize the return on every labor dollar spent. These things can all be done incrementally to good effect. That is, to your point: throwing robots at an inefficient warehouse just gets you an inefficient warehouse full of robots. And yes, designing the warehouse from the ground up to support automation as efficiently as possible is a good idea, but focusing on human efficiency will get you 90% of the way there - and then you can spend the other 90% of that effort on whiz-bang software and droids ;)

bsanr2 6y ago
The clerks at the warehouse I worked at spent 30 min-1 hour every day hand-collating order manifests because whatever system that spit them out (from some contractor or corporate?) did so as PDFs that couldn't be easily modified. Literally building packets that were similarly structured, every night, by hand. I did what I could with Excel macros to automate as much as I could, but I'm not a trained coder and I definitely didn't have security access to implement the tools that could have saved us huge headaches. I wondered quite a bit who the hell up top got paid to set up this process.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Yep, sounds like a classic case of an ERP or order management system throwing documents over the wall because "well all the data's there, so the warehouse can figure it out". And as for "who got paid", probably some COBOL programmer who retired decades ago and is now living the dream entirely offline in a beach house in Costa Rica. Which goes to show that the warehouses themselves are only part of the battle. Just as critical is the whole org holistically taking downstream impacts into account. It's why I make it a point to be on the warehouse floor, doing the ground floor work firsthand, talking to warehouse workers, understanding and observing for myself where the bottlenecks are. That's the only way to really know you're actually helping.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  PDFs can be pretty horrible, but you can ingest them through Excel's Power Query these days if they actually have the text embedded. I got annoyed with importing data for taxes in one instance recently and actually was able to recover all the data from a printable PDF form to then turn into a standard format. There are so many parts of Excel that seem designed by different groups at different times, with varying levels of stability and sense-making, and so I think it takes a lot of experience just to know what exists and when to access it. My approach these days is to do anything I can in Power Query and anything I can't in VBA. And those can connect to virtually anything. I avoid other stuff such as Power BI, the data model, DAX, formulas on worksheets, etc. due to painful experience.

bsanr2 6y ago

Well, now you have to pay for building the warehouse, and hope that the tech it's built around doesn't become outmoded before the upfront costs are made back + profit.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]