The end of the year prompts various summaries. In your opinion, can 2017 be considered a breakthrough year for intralogistics? What trends have shaped the development of this industry in Poland and around the world?
Andrzej Michalski, Director of the Automation Sales Department, SSI Schäfer: For some time now, the driving force behind intralogistics has been, above all, the rapid development of e-commerce. Therefore, I believe that a breakthrough in the industry has been noticeable for several years. Cross-border e-commerce, characterized by double-digit annual growth, is stimulating global economic growth very dynamically. Already 3/4 of Europeans use the Internet, and more than 40% of this population makes purchases online. The world’s largest electronic shopping markets are China, the USA, and Great Britain. Poland, with a market value of approximately 7.6 billion euros, is not yet among the European leaders (for comparison: Great Britain – 157 billion euros, Germany – 60 billion euros), however, the upward trend is very clear, and from the above data, one can conclude that the growth potential is enormous*.
E-commerce forces major changes in intralogistics. It is characterized by a larger number of orders consisting of very few lines (for the B2C channel, the typical value is only 1.2 lines per order) and a large number of returns (especially in the clothing industry). The logistical handling of online stores carries investment uncertainty. Precise estimation of the required capacities and efficiency of warehouse and picking systems, especially in the case of newly emerging businesses, is basically impossible.
Growing requirements generate the need to transport and handle increasing quantities of smaller and smaller load units. Carrying out logistics operations without maximally flexible and integrated systems is basically impossible. How does this translate into practice?
The most flexible storage, transport, and order picking systems are manual installations, where the above operations are carried out by warehouse workers using basic technical infrastructure (e.g., racks, forklifts, picking carts, warehouse management systems, RF terminals, etc.). However, it turns out that very time-consuming operations, characterizing, among other things, order picking and packing in the e-commerce industry, require the employment of many people, and it is difficult to find employees in the current labor market. In many warehouses and distribution centers, more than half of the staff are our eastern neighbors. And that is not the end of the troubles…
Since manual solutions – maximally flexible but requiring large teams of employees – are not optimal in the era of the triumphant march of e-commerce, the use of automated systems, where human labor is replaced by machines, is being considered more and more widely. This is the main trend of today’s intralogistics. High-reach forklifts can be replaced by automated stacker cranes, “pallet trucks” by conveyors, and man-to-goods methods by automated goods-to-man methods, where the goods arrive at the warehouse worker handling processes (e.g., picking and packing) at stationary workstations.
Automated solutions ensure optimal use of available space, significant acceleration of processes, and reduction of employment, but they are always less flexible than manual solutions. So how to design an automated system that combines the advantages of automation with maintaining maximum flexibility? The key is to use easily expandable technologies and systems, both automated and semi-automated, such as: carousel warehouses (e.g., Schäfer Carousel System), vertical lift modules (e.g., Logimat), automated shuttle warehouses for storing containers and cartons (e.g., CUBY), and picking support systems (e.g., PickToTote, PickByLight, PickByVoice, e-Pick). Examples of flexible internal transport systems are overhead conveyor installations (automated, semi-automated, manual) (e.g., Translog) and AGV systems (e.g., Weasel). Particularly interesting are AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) class systems, which ensure that the facility floor is freed from inflexible conveyor infrastructure, which allows for very convenient remodeling of the system (changing routes, increasing the number of vehicles) as needs change.