Signs of the coming automated future are all around us these days. You may see a driverless car on the highway, or visit a restaurant with an automated kiosk, or see a delivery drone fly overhead. These new developments in robotics and automation have been a long time coming, but now their adoption in a wide range of different service industries is really beginning to accelerate. The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and human labor challenges are continuing to drive us towards a new future. This shift is also becoming more widespread behind the curtain, in product supply chains as well as shipping and logistics. Our experts at DMW&H are now focused on these key elements of supply chain automation.
REDUCING DEAD TIME
Dead time or downtime is a feature, not a bug, of human workers. People take vacations, they sleep, they eat, they get sick, they get tired. Robots do none of these things. Certainly they require maintenance to work properly, need updates, and can break down. However, they drastically reduce the dead time in your supply chain over human workers. When you implement an automated component in place of a laborer, you immediately open up a new frontier of productivity.
FORECASTING
Modern supply chain software is bringing forecasting to a new level. One thing that became abundantly clear following the COVID-19 pandemic was that supply chains are more vulnerable to disturbances than we thought. Gone are the days of basic forecasting that just takes into account annual trends like shopping patterns and holidays. Today’s artificial intelligence software is able to predict different causes of supply chain bottlenecks, warehousing needs, customer concerns, and an associated range of relevant data. Analytics today are a crucial park of demand prediction and streamlining implementation of new robotics.
INTEGRATION
The more individual pieces of your supply chain are able to communicate and respond to one another, the more resilient that system will be to disruption. If a customer request or order change is not integrated into the same software system as your backend supply chain, there is a gap where productivity can be lost due to miscommunication. The key to modern integration solutions is making them usable by human administrators. This means sifting through the background noise of data and highlighting actionable information. Our experts at DMW&H have spent the last two years finding these sweet spots where systems can be integrated in order to make supply chains more efficient moving forward.
THINK OUTSIDE THE BOTS
Understandably, a lot of the focus in supply chain automation is on autonomous mobile robots, or AMRs. These are the driverless forklifts, product retrieval robots, and related vehicles that can replace individual workers. Now that AMRs have become commonplace, supply chain automation is taking new forms. These often take the form of integrated automated systems which use AMRs at specific points, with newer technologies filling in the gaps. Our team at DMW&H would be happy to discuss these exciting new supply chain features, just give us a call today or email today!