Five Reasons to Automate Warehouses with an Integrated Robotics System

With demand for goods at record highs, it’s crucial to operate warehouses efficiently and cost-effectively. The warehousing worker shortage underscores the benefits of introducing robotics to support human workers. Robots don’t replace humans but work alongside them to make warehousing work safer and more rewarding. Robots reduce the need for dangerous human-operated material-handling equipment and extensive walking by workers from one zone to another.

With robots, workers can be assigned to a specific zone, while the robots transport goods from one area of the warehouse to another. As a result, orders are turned quicker and companies can keep their order windows open longer, all of which boost customer-service levels. Today’s advanced robotics systems include built-in tools that provide data to managers in real time so that they can make adjustments to labor and machine assignments and run their operations more efficiently. Advanced robotics systems also feature an acquisition model called Robots as a Service (RaaS), which allows companies to keep a core fleet of robots at the ready, while scaling up and down to accommodate surges in traffic and eliminate the massive capital investments to acquire a fleet of robots. Today’s advanced robotics systems include robot form factors that can perform all of the tasks required of them in a logistics facility. An integration platform coordinates the entire fleet of robots and their activities and integrates data and warehousing operations from end to end. Without a single integrated system, coordinating activity among all the robots in a facility would be difficult, if not impossible. Logistics operations are becoming all the more crucial for companies, and they require orchestration of logistics operations with an integrated system that holistically manages all of the human and robotic tasks required to get materials and products in and out of warehouses.