„SMART Warehousing with RTLS & Co.“ –
The Transformation of Intralogistics

Intralogistics is already highly modernized, working with the latest technology, digitizing and automating warehouse and supply chain processes to relieve staff. Since factors such as performance fluctuations and staff absences, especially in times of pandemic, make it difficult to reliably plan the supply chain. In addition, there are internal and external unpredictable events that can affect the operability of the supply chain strategy and cause delays in the flow of materials and transportation.
Fast delivery times are one of the most important customer needs, whether for e-commerce or for suppliers of process as well as discrete industry and production.

Challenges and goals in intralogistics:

• High quality standard with increasing economic efficiency
• Shortened throughput times coupled with high capacity utilization of equipment and transport fleet
• Reduction of administrative, manual processes in order to use employees for qualitative tasks

With the help of SMART technologies, efforts are already being made to reduce manual/human interfaces and work steps. The more process steps are performed automatically by a system, the fewer errors potentially occur in the intralogistics workflow. The same applies to cost efficiency.

SMART also means using data from the past to determine measures to reduce lead times. By evaluating material flow analyses, lead time drivers can be identified and the potential for improving and avoiding losses can be identified. For example, routes of intralogistic transport vehicles such as forklifts, AGVs or route trains can be analyzed and optimized in order to shorten process times.

Demand fluctuations can be identified via forecasts from the corresponding ERP / EWM systems in order to purchase goods in line with demand.

If these SAP systems are linked to RTLS platforms such as INTRANAV.IO, incoming goods can be moved and stored 23% faster by automating manual work steps and intelligent IoT logic across the shop floor. For example, when unloading trucks at the supplier gates, goods are already received according to prioritization principles in order to reduce costs for idle times and to accelerate the unloading and picking processes. In this process, a dashboard shows the forklift driver which gate to unload next and how many units have already been unloaded. This information is provided to the driver in real-time!

KPI- and process monitoring on the Shop floor

In addition to process acceleration, shift supervisors monitor all shop floor movements as a digital mirror via the INTRANAV.IO platform. In this way, all movements of objects on thousands of square meters of floor space are digitally captured and displayed on your screen or tablet.

The real-time data of item movements from picking to posting can be transmitted to electronic shop floor dashboards, allowing employees and warehouse managers to monitor all turnover figures at a glance. If there are any bottlenecks, they can identify directly where the error or problem occurs.

These processes can be supported and efficiently controlled all the way to storage and further goods movements on the shopfloor to the production line or to supply for further shipment with real-time location data and the integrated INTRANAV IoT platform as well as smart applications such as the INTRANAV.APPs.

This real-time information can also be used to notify logistics service providers and shipping service providers (3-PL or CEP) ahead of time, for example to transmit loading lists.

Adherence to compliance guidelines

SMART also means that “compliance” can be performed more easily. The two-eye principle is no longer necessary, because the real-time position data of the warehouse objects can be accessed 24/7 in the respective SAP ERP/WMS systems or via INTRANAV.APPs such as the “Inventory Manager”. Accordingly, the location data can reliably replace the inventory, as these systems already provide the data.

Threats to the implementation of SMART Warehousing

For small and medium-sized companies in particular, capacity bottlenecks, budget miscalculations and overly ambitious goals can have a negative impact on the transition to a digital warehouse. We recommend getting consultants on board or exchanging ideas with digitization experts and starting with small digitization projects. It is smart to make sure that these projects and use cases are easily scalable from the beginning, which is the case with RTLS, for example. These can be rolled out quickly to other warehouses and locations, but can also be connected to all hardware and industrial software, such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce or analysis software via an interface.

Learn more in our On-Deman webinar!

The future of SMART Warehousing and Intralogistics 4.0

In the future, there won’t even be light in the warehouse because robots don’t need light. There will be at most one humanoid operator per warehouse who checks that the robots / AGVs do what they are supposed to do. The future of the smart warehouse starts with the manufacturing company and ends with the end customer. SMART Warehouse will no longer be limited to the warehouse. Holistic and lean approaches will lead to improvement. Sustainability, in particular, can be improved as a result.

In the future, for example, social media data and global economic information can be used to derive and recommend direct action. See “Chip crisis”. For example, all suppliers were “outsourced” to foreign countries to save money, with no contingency plan for the so-called second source. This is expected to be predictable in the future through intelligent logics integrated with Forecast Monitoring, Big Data and IoT Intelligence systems.