Warehouses

Category: Warehouses (page 3 of 3)

Robots Manage Hitachi Warehouse Workers

Ever get the feeling that your manager is cold and lacks any kind of emotion? This feeling must be all too familiar with workers in Hitachi warehouses in Japan where robots are giving out the orders.

The new machine manager uses artificial intelligence to manage human workers. The intelligence is gathered from learning human techniques and then processing them to continuously improve efficiency according to an article published in the Daily Mail recently.

While true robot intelligence is some way off, production work in warehouses seems to be the ideal environment for this first generation of robot managers. This may make unsettling reading for the average warehouse worker however. While robots are likely to be far more efficient and cheaper than hiring a human manager, they are not going to be sympathetic or empathise if a worker has problems.

Fortunately humans are still in control of the process and robots at the Hitachi warehouses are there purely to increase performance. This is something they are already achieving with productivity boosted by 8% in those warehouses using them.

Warehouse workers will take orders from the robots and then they will be asked to come up with better ways to do things and suggest ways to solve problems. The robot will then choose the best ones and make the necessary improvements. Scary stuff.

The Return of The Urban Warehouse

August 10, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

Just when you thought they had been consigned to history, warehouses in the city are once again seeing a rise in demand as online retailers are pressured into delivering next day and on time.

Far from spelling the end of the out of town super warehouse, the new breed of smaller urban warehouses will be an important step on the journey a product takes to get to the purchaser’s address.

Even with today’s sophisticated storage and delivery technology, it is still a stretch for companies to be able to deliver at specific times without any delays. So having an urban warehouse on the spot where goods can be quickly transferred in the locality will speed things up a lot.

Amazon once again are the ones blazing a trail in recent years when they introduced a small network of warehouses to London in 2013 and there are plans for further expansion in US cities to go with the 19 urban warehouses it already has.

The move towards urban warehouses is sure to make an interesting investment proposition as land prices are already sky high in cities like London. It may also put pressure on the development of residential property, which ironically has benefitted from the conversion of old 19th Century warehouses into trendy loft apartments.

More Warehouses Needed To Satisfy Growing Demand For Space

July 17, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

The shopping revolution we call ecommerce has led to an ever increasing demand for space to fit the huge amount of products bought online every day and the demand is only set to get bigger in the years to come. This presents a problem for warehouse builders and the people who fit them. How is can they keep up?

The answer to this is that they are currently struggling to keep up according to a new white paper which highlights that developers are currently unable to build properties quick enough to satisfy demand.

The white paper was put together by Colliers International as well as a logistics companies, architects and project consultants to examine how the commercial property sector is coping with demand for warehouses to store goods for ecommerce stores.

According to the white paper, Internet sales are expected to grow by a 15% every year and this will be the case for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately Large-scale Grade A warehouses that measure in excess of 100,000sq ft are in short supply and even when planning permission is gained to build them, it takes a year to 18 months to build them. The current supply of warehouses of this size available in the UK means that there is less than 10 months before capacity is reached according to Colliers.

How eCommerce Growth Will Revolutionise Warehousing And Logistics

July 13, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

The growth in ecommerce has the look and feel of a revolution more awe inspiring and life changing than anything seen since the industrial revolution.

Warehousing and logistics have always been important to retailers of course. This is nothing new but what has changed due to the growth of eCommerce is the speed and ease at which anyone can just go online and order pretty much whatever they want.

From the moment a button is clicked to purchase online, a chain of events is set in motion which can to the delivery of goods in less than 24 hours in some cases. Back in the early days of the Internet, this sort of speed would have been virtually unheard of.

Another step change we are already seeing in eCommerce is the growth in sales made on mobile phones. Google has already responded this new phenomenon by encouraging all website owners to make their websites mobile friendly.

The very idea of ordering something on a mobile phone a few years ago would have been scoffed at. People wanted to look and feel the product they were buying, but there is the feeling that this is slowly going out of fashion.

Photographs are far more crisp and realistic than they used to be and it’s now not such a big deal to order something on the strength of a picture we can zoom into and rotate in 3d if we so choose.

Are Robots About To Replace Humans In The Warehouse

June 30, 2015 / admin / 0 Comments

It’s the stuff of nightmares for your average warehouse worker to think that robots might eventually replace them.

After all, robots don’t get ill, they don’t need to be trained in health and safety and they can just keep on working around the clock when us humans are spending 8 hours recharging our batteries every 24 hours.

Amazon which is one of the world’s biggest employers of warehouse staff held a competition recently to find out if robots really could do the work of its 50,000 US warehouse staff. Robots were put to the test packing anything from toasters to thin paperbacks.

Unfortunately while robots hold advantages over human workers, the competition proved that robots are still no match for humans when it comes to using a bit of initiative. Warehouse picking and packing is a much more intellectually demanding job than most people think and the robots involved soon showed that they were nowhere near up to the task.

The robots were not only slow and cumbersome compared to human workers, they also failed to identify objects as well as humans. Ironically for a company that began life distributing books, the robots had more trouble with paperback books than anything else.

July 1, 2014 / admin / 0 Comments

Times have changed, with people talking about the need to consolidate costs and making the most of what you have. Manufacturing plants, commercial warehousing and distribution centres need innovative solutions in order to be profitable and to keep up with their competition. So how can a business make an impact on their bottom line by making changes in storage facility? There are some things to consider when planning and designing your warehouse:

1. Employee Safety: It is both legal and a smart business decision to ensure employees are in a safe, ergonomic-friendly work environment. Consider ways to make your warehouse easy to manoeuvre, have plenty of regular safety checks and encourage employees to share ideas on how to better your business. Taking safety and comfort for your staff into consideration when planning will make for a healthy, happy workplace.

2. Consider Future Needs: Employers often ask candidates in the interviewing process ‘where do you see yourself in 5 years?’ but how many ask themselves the same question? When planning your space, make sure you leave yourself the flexibility to easily grow with your business.

3. Functional Space Layout: With careful planning, you might be quite surprised how much you can actually do with the space available to you. Today there are so many clever concepts and options available to businesses to maximise every usable inch of space in your warehouse.

4. Sustainable Technologies: There are regulatory environmental concerns that need to be considered when making plans for your storage and warehousing. There are sustainable options today that are kinder to the environment as well as offering a safe working environment.

If you don’t know where to start, you are not alone. After all, your area of expertise lies within your own industry. Storage and warehousing can be complicated and overwhelming for a business, especially for a start-up company. Consider contacting a free consultation with one of Millenium SI experts for a discussion about a well-designed and economical storage solution for your business.

Call us now on 01942 603344.