Material Handling Equipments and changing landscape in Warehousing industry

In modern era, the activity of moving the material from one place to another has transformed from mundane physical work to sophisticated technology driven one. Material handling equipments are changing the world considerably. This transformation is largely driven by a series of necessity driven inventions, having its roots with probably the greatest invention of mankind, the wheel. This change is felt largely in supply chain management area of the modern business especially the warehousing field.

Traditionally man goes to material and move it from one place to another with various material handling equipments. This scene is getting changed. Technology has transformed this activity to a state where man to goods is reducing and leaving way to goods to man movements. Be it the automated storage and retrieval systems, conveyors, WCS, the options are plenty to achieve this.

Even drones are getting extensively used in modern warehouses to perform various activities like identifying and cycle counting of goods in a warehouse. As we read this there might be a possibility that yet another equipment has been invented in the field of warehousing. The change is real, rapid and robust.

Material handling equipments can be classified into four different genres.

• Storage equipments like Racks, Bins, Totes and others
• Man to goods equipments like Pallet jacks, Automated Guiding vehicles and others
• Goods to man equipments like WCS, conveyors, AS/RS and others
• Locating and moving enablers like Pick to light, Voice enablers, Hand held terminals, Barcode readers and others.

The industry is rapidly moving towards goods to man equipments. It has lot of pros and cons. Pros include

• Increased throughput
• Lesser chances of manual errors
• Enables easier warehousing operations especially packaging, sortation and others.

These goods to man MHEs comes with some cons as well.

• Often they are rigid and pose difficulties while change processes within a warehouse once they are installed.
• Comes with significant initial investment costs.
• Lacks flexibility in warehouse layout changes.
• At times prone to instable system integration with WMS applications.

In conclusion, technology changes are inevitable and here to stay forever. Let’s keep changing and evolving over a period of time.