At a glance
Shifting from manual material transportation to automated conveyance results in moderate savings in energy consumption, CO₂ emissions and OpEx.
The case in context
Manual warehouses require a significant labor force to transport goods from the inbound staging area to the racking area and, after picking, to outbound. The growing challenges of securing sufficient labor and increasing the throughput and capacity of warehouses create rising demand for automated material handling technologies. Compared to automated solutions, manual material handling requires larger fleets of powered industrial vehicles (PIV) and therefore contributes to higher CO₂ emissions.
Manual warehouses commonly use material transportation via reach trucks and low level order pickers (LLOP) due to their low complexity, easy scalability, and low cost of implementation. As throughput increases, the demand for both PIV and labor rises, making automation more appealing.
A closer look: case details and parameters
For this scenario, we compare the reference retail dry goods warehouse, which uses wide aisle racking and manual material transportation with PIV, with a warehouse utilizing AS/RS and goods-to-person picking, as described in the case above. The latter warehouse also has an additional automated conveyor system for the transportation of items.
All these improvements further increase picking productivity and reduce covered distances.
Results
In our analysis, the automated conveyor system displayed the following benefits:
- No more need for reach trucks and LLOP for material handling thanks to automated conveyance
- Approximately 55% lower FTE requirements for material handling
- 25% lower electricity consumption and CO₂ emissions due to reduction in PIV
As in the previous case, the downside of the automation option is the required upfront investment. Despite this, the conveyor system delivers a 19% reduction in operating expenses over a 15-year period.
Evaluation: low economic and environmental benefits as a stand-alone measure
Automating material transportation as a lone-standing measure has very little impact in terms of reducing CO₂ emissions and a moderate-to-low impact in terms of reducing OpEx. Therefore, we recommend considering this measure mainly in conjunction with the storage technology case. Automating transportation in addition to the storage technology increases the overall automation degree of the warehouse, enabling further benefits such as an overall reduced warehouse area, reduced reliance on manual labor and a higher throughput capacity.
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