The modern warehouse is an innovative powerhouse, driven by a fascinating array of tools and technologies that promise a new vision of supply chain success: extraordinary operational efficiency and accuracy, to ensure that customers’ demands are not only consistently met but often exceeded. These technologies also promise to improve life for warehouse workers, limiting physical strain and improving overall safety and boosting morale within today’s warehouse environment.
It’s no secret that sectors such as retail and eCommerce are changing rapidly, but the pace of this transformation has definitely picked up in the last few years. New technologies are unveiled at a dizzying pace, leaving many enterprises struggling to keep up. The failure to follow or adopt new trends can be a real liability, however, causing businesses to miss out on a potentially powerful competitive edge.
Not every trend is relevant or realistic within every business, but it’s critical to understand the supply chain landscape — and where it’s headed. We’ll reveal the exciting tech-driven solutions in warehouse management below, along with opportunities to integrate these into the warehouses of tomorrow:
Assistive Technologies To Improve Warehouse Efficiency
Assistive technologies involve a wide array of tools, devices, or equipment designed to make critical tasks easier for warehouse workers. These advanced technologies can improve safety, efficiency, and accuracy, helping to overcome many of the most stubborn challenges within the traditional warehouse.
For decades, warehouse workers have dealt with on-the-job fatigue and repetitive strain, leaving them vulnerable to a whole host of injuries. They have worked hard to keep up with the accelerating demands of the modern warehouse, and now, businesses have the ability to give them the support they deserve.
Exosuits
Dramatically reducing the physical burden of everyday warehouse tasks, exosuits provide physical support for workers. These help workers maintain optimal posture to reduce back pain and can also limit strain when lifting heavy items. Increasingly, many exosuits also incorporate sensors that can gather data and, based on those insights, make adjustments to provide more customized support.
Verve Motion is a major player in the exosuit market, best known for SafeLift exosuits that promise to limit worker fatigue and reduce the risk of injury. These also incorporate data-driven insights, making the most of the Verve Logic platform to explore motion-based patterns related to productivity, job functions, or even risky movements.
Wearable Technology
Wearable technology takes many forms, but includes any devices that can be attached to the body. In the warehouse, these devices collect information or streamline critical tasks. For example, wearable scanners allow for easier maneuvering than their hand-held counterparts, while wearable mobile printers make it easier to produce labels on the go. Some warehouses now even use augmented solutions such as smart glasses, which can display useful information.
Voice-Activated Technologies
Hands-free voice-guided solutions provide instructions so that workers do not need to pause to read instructions. Workers continue to keep their hands free while confirming tasks, bringing improved accountability to these systems. This limits distractions within the warehouse so that employees can remain focused on the task at hand. This can also help with training, allowing new staff members to adapt to the warehouse environment with ease.
Advanced Imaging and Identification Systems
Imaging systems can capture and analyze visual data, using these insights to support everything from warehouse automation to strategic decision-making. These systems increasingly rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning to process complex data and to identify patterns or even anomalies. Identification systems are similar but may use sources other than visual data to track items while promoting efficient and accurate order fulfillment.
Machine Vision Systems
Machine vision mimics the power of human sight, using advanced systems to capture visual data in real time. This is largely used for quality control purposes, although machine vision can also support sorting and can guide robotic arms for picking and packing. Add AI integration to the mix, and MV systems can be downright transformative, bringing a new vision of warehousing automation to life.
Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID)
Radio-frequency identification uses advanced systems involving readers and tags to transmit information without requiring a direct line of sight. This promotes efficient inventory management and can limit the time needed to complete stock counts or shipment verifications.
RFID has a long history in warehousing, but its applications have shifted in recent years, integrating cutting-edge solutions such as artificial intelligence to expand on its already impressive versatility. Today’s RFID solutions support predictive analytics, revealing impactful trends while also offering real-time monitoring that supports diverse applications such as cold chain logistics and high-value asset tracking.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics
RFID represents just one of many tried-and-tested warehouse technologies that promise to take a major step up in response to AI and data-driven strategies. AI enhances many promising warehouse technologies, using data to uncover hidden patterns and opportunities that might otherwise remain out of reach.
AI technologies continue to advance, and, moving forward, these will support revolutionary automation solutions that remove bottlenecks, expedite workflows, and uncover exciting new possibilities for the warehouses and distribution centers of the future.
AI-Driven Analytics Platforms
There is currently a strong push for AI adoption across numerous industries, and warehousing is certainly no exception. AI can be a warehousing game-changer, using warehousing data to optimize decision-making. Analytics platforms can streamline this process, making AI solutions more accessible and easier to implement within the warehouses of tomorrow. These will drive exciting improvements in demand forecasting, supply chain visibility, and inventory management.
Generative AI in Supply Chain Management
Generative AI is typically associated with content creation, but it can produce far more than text or images. This technology can also support simulations, which help to reveal how stock levels can be optimized and can even help businesses develop contingency plans based on simulated scenarios.
Robotics and Automation
Automated solutions expedite everyday warehouse operations, sparking dramatic efficiency improvements that, even a few short years ago, would have felt entirely out of reach. Robotics tackle everything from picking and packing to sortation and even auditing.
These robotic innovations take many forms, with different automated solutions targeted at different aspects of the warehouse environment and, increasingly, incorporating AI and other cutting-edge technologies to further enhance their already impressive precision and adaptability.
Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs)
Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are remarkable additions to the modern warehouse environment, capable of independently navigating warehouse spaces without direct human intervention. These transport robots spell huge advantages in terms of efficiency, with AMRs capable of quickly moving pallets, bins, or even individual items between locations. This can be useful for sorting, consolidation, production line replenishment, or even tasks like waste management.
Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs)
Similar to AMRs but dependent on fixed paths, automated guided vehicles feature pre-programmed routes and lack decision-making abilities. These work well in tightly controlled warehouse environments, operating consistently and predictably. While these, at first glance, may seem less sophisticated than AMRs, they have their advantages: they can often handle heavier loads and tend to require less of an upfront investment.
Drones for Inventory Management
Automated drones resemble automated mobile robots in that they can function independently, but drones take these abilities literally to new heights, moving away from ground-based autonomous transport and instead navigating three-dimensional spaces, where, if equipped with RFID readers, they have the ability to scan tags. This provides a highly efficient alternative to manual inventory scanning, delivering fast and accurate counts.
Sustainability and Efficiency
Warehouses can be a liability from an ecological standpoint, with traditional practices contributing to significant waste and sizable carbon footprints. With today’s consumers revealing a strong preference for brands that live up to their ethical ideals, sustainability feels increasingly like a priority across numerous sectors. In warehousing, this offers the added perk of considerable cost savings, especially when sustainability initiatives draw on efficiency-boosting tools and technologies.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Requirements
Setting strict standards to determine how business operations manage relationships, maintain ethics-driven practices, and impact the planet, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives provide frameworks for running warehouses and entire businesses responsibly. This holds intrinsic value but should also be prioritized because consumers increasingly expect businesses to follow through on ethical commitments and support meaningful causes.
Energy-Efficient Warehouse Solutions
While tried-and-tested solutions such as recycling programs can help businesses make modest improvements regarding warehouse sustainability, many are eager to take this effort to the next level. Smart systems, in particular, have the potential to dramatically reduce energy consumption, drawing on data produced by IoT sensors (along with advanced artificial intelligence solutions) to reveal patterns and adjust heating, cooling, or lighting accordingly. Other promising options include sustainable barcodes and even electric-powered forklifts.
How Peak Technologies is Leading the Future of Warehouse Innovation
Leading the charge in the fast-paced world of warehousing, logistics, and supply chain management, Peak Technologies helps innovation-oriented enterprises determine which technologies best meet their unique needs — and how these solutions can be unleashed within the modern warehouse environment. We offer guidance with everything from RFID solutions to robotics and machine vision. Get in touch to learn more about these powerful opportunities.
